Challenges EVBox realized when it came to gaining control over information flow and new product development (NPD), spreadsheets and manual processes wouldn't cut it. They needed to bring together product information, people, and processes into a single system.
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ABOUT THE COMPANY

To build a sustainable future, EVBox empowers businesses and drivers to embrace electric mobility. EVBox’s charging solutions lay the foundations for a world where electric mobility is the new normal by giving EV drivers the ability to charge with confidence, allowing businesses to easily enter the market and scale their offering as demand grows, and evolving with the rapid pace of innovation. Founded in 2010, EVBox is now a market leader in electric vehicle charging infrastructure (EVSE) and has delivered over 500,000 charging ports to partners and customers globally. The solutions EVBox is offering include charging stations for residential, commercial, and fast-charging network usage, as well as charging management software.

AT A GLANCE

Mission
Powering our sustainable future

Best Thing About Arena
Speeds product development and commercialization with a single source of truth

Bottom-Line Impact
Provides a unified PLM and QMS solution to centrally manage product, quality, and compliance information across global teams

Key Benefits
• Streamline processes with single PLM and QMS solution
• Enable real-time collaboration with global contract manufacturers
• Achieve efficient product development processes
• Track and close quality issues faster and easier
• Speed product commercialization
• Support better traceability and documentation for compliance

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BUSINESS CHALLENGES

An overreliance on spreadsheets can cause unnecessary complications within a business. Just ask EVBox. When EVBox started, they realized early on that when it came to gaining more control over information flow and new product development (NPD) they needed a better, more efficient process. Spreadsheets weren’t cutting it, especially with global contract manufacturers (CMs) and anticipated expansion into new geographies. They needed to move away from manual, disconnected processes and bring together product information, people, and tighter processes into a single collaborative system.

SOLUTION

Knowing a product lifecycle management (PLM) system was what they required, EVBox evaluated different PLM solutions. The Arena Cloud PLM solution consistently came out as the top choice providing the capabilities EVBox needed for new product development and secure collaboration with their manufacturing partners. EVBox also saw the benefit of the unified quality management system (QMS) Arena provided. Arena not only helped EVBox scale from a startup to a more mature business model, but also provided better efficiencies across its product and quality processes.

Implementing Arena has given the company’s product development and engineering change processes a better sense of logic along with a historical perspective to better understand the issue at hand. Steven Whitacre, Senior Program Manager of EVBox, said, “Arena has made our processes more efficient. If you have a quality issue, you can track it through to the engineering change when it was implemented for full traceability.” Arena has also helped with compliance, especially with their U.S. products that need to comply with the UL standard, Whitacre said. “We make our U.S. products to the UL standard and often engineer our European products to that standard as well. Arena is a solid platform to keep all the required documentation together.”

KEY BENEFITS

Since implementing Arena, EVBox can work with contract manufacturers much easier, allowing them to work in other countries like France and the U.S. Whitacre said, “Having a single source of truth with Arena has been very helpful, especially when working with global locations. This is significant in our daily change management work as it makes information accessible and clear and streamlines the approval process.”

As EVBox has grown from 200 to over 700 employees, Arena has scaled with them and has helped them remain focused on the end-user experience. “We focus on the installer, so our products are easy to install, safe, and have a nice aesthetic design,” said Whitacre.

Another key benefit of implementing Arena has been a single source of truth platform for PLM and QMS. Before, EVBox had a stand-alone QMS solution. With Arena, they now have QMS and PLM in a single, unified system making it easier to manage from an IT perspective along with the ability to associate corrective and preventive actions (CAPAs) to changes and why they were made.

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Arena brings product and quality information, crossfunctional teams, and processes into a single cloudnative system so everyone is on the same page. This helps speed up new product development and new product introduction and simplifies documentation and compliance for regulations like UL and ISO. Work gets done faster whether it’s a new product or an existing product by speeding approvals and enabling collaboration with supply chains. With supply chains changing faster than ever, the cloud-native aspect of Arena makes it perfect for today’s agile teams like EVBox.

“Arena helps companies like EVBox move away from manual, disconnected systems and bring together product information, people, and processes in a single, cloud-native PLM system. The result is—faster product development and faster commercialization. ”

– Steven Whitacre, Senior Program Manager, EVBox

In a recent study conducted by EVBox, one of the major uncertainties about switching to electric driving is the availability of EV charging stations. If this key barrier for drivers is removed, EV adoption will increase exponentially. They have officially set the goal to deliver one million flexible and scalable charging stations to their customers and partners by 2025 and are ready to meet the challenge with the Arena PLM and QMS framework in place.