Foundry Networks proves value of on-demand PLM

Network switches, routers, security and web traffic management systems builder Foundry Networks has revealed that it’s been successfully running with on-demand PLM (product lifecycle management) services from Arena Solutions since summer of last year. The company says it’s now using the service to manage all product data and its design and supply chain work with contract manufacturers and suppliers. So that’s authoring and managing everything from product definition to engineering BoMs (bills of materials) and specification documents – also sharing all that with the extended supply chain. Foundry Networks claims it has significantly improved and accelerated product development world-wide. The project now enables suppliers, large and small, to work concurrently from a single, centralised product record accessed over the Internet with single sign-on, security and the rest. That means not only real-time, 24x7 access to accurate data and the end of costly errors and lost time due to manual data re-entry, but effective working across company boundaries without additional IT and network infrastructure overhead. Further, Foundry Networks has also completed integration of the PLM environment with its Oracle ERP. Data consistency there completes the picture with, for example, material components ordering and supply chain management always based on current, correct information. “Given our prior experience implementing traditional client/server PLM solutions, we have been very impressed with Arena PLM,” says Richard Bridges, Foundry Networks’ vice president of manufacturing. “Arena’s on-demand model liberates us from maintaining costly IT infrastructure and allows us to focus on what we do best,” he adds. Eric Larkin, Arena Solutions founder and CTO, explains: “What we bring to the table is a web-served, on-demand PLM environment that makes it much easier to get supplier participation, whether the user is a strategic customer or not. It provides much greater leverage than if they’re trying to sign up a whole bunch of systems. “Also, we have a whole supplier community that already uses Arena PLM. So for the majority of manufacturers that don’t yet have a PLM system – because of the risks they see of a traditional PLM deployment – on-demand makes a lot of sense… And they get the idea of built-in innovation – with our enhancements automatically available to customers without costly upgrades.”