Arena Solutions, a US American PLM manufacturer, is a true pioneer when it comes to cloud PLM. The company has been offering its customers cloud-based SaaS applications for product lifecycle management and quality assurance for over 15 years. They are primarily used by smaller start-ups and leading high-tech companies in the USA but also by customers in 80 other countries.

The company has created an integration solution between Arena PLM and SAP together with PROSTEP’s US subsidiary that makes it possible for customers to bring their new products to market faster. The OpenPDM-based integration ensures that manufacturing is always working with the latest version of BOMs, article master data, approved manufacturing lists and associated documents.

The OpenPDM connector accesses the Arena PLM module ERP Exchange, which exports product information like BOMs, change orders, article master data and parts master data as a PDX package in XML format. OpenPDM validates the data and any changes made to it and then automatically imports it into SAP. It is also possible to supply different instances of the ERP system with data. Data transfer is logged and can be monitored in a dashboard to enable immediate response to any errors that occur while the data is being transferred.

With its OpenPDM connector for Arena PLM, PROSTEP demonstrates that the world’s leading integration platform can also be used to connect cloud-based PLM solutions with on-premise enterprise applications. The company is currently developing an enhanced connector to the cloud-based ERP solution SAP S/4 HANA, which will allow OpenPDM to also support hybrid cloud/cloud scenarios in the future.