Customer Interview:JUUL Switches to Propel

Propel’s fiscal year recently ended, and we saw a LOT of Arena customers moving to Propel. The recent private equity acquisition of Arena seems to have spurred more and more Arena customers to question the future of Arena. But even before that, we had seen Arena customers switch to Propel because of greater flexibility, innovation, scalability and ease of use.

JUUL Labs is one example of a new Propel customer, migrating from Arena. Michele Yoshikawa, Product Manager at Propel, recently had the privilege to sit down with JUUL’s Product Lifecycle Manager David Karosick and get his take on Propel.

You can listen to the highlights of the interview or enjoy the full recording.

What did David have to say about Propel and JUUL Labs?

• Although JUUL had been using Arena’s PLM for several years, they realized that the solution wasn’t scalable or flexible enough to keep up with the company’s rapid growth. During peak times, JUUL used to have to add on more staff because it was too difficult to manage product updates in Arena. Also during the evaluation of Propel, David realized that even though he had used Arena for 3 years, it took him twice as long to create and release items, compared to using Propel (where he only had 3 weeks of experience).
• System migration can be scary — there’s a lot of uncertainty when moving data, training users, figuring out integrations. But according to David, the migration to Propel was “comically smooth.” Propel’s top goal is to make our customers 100% happy, so we’re glad to hear that JUUL Labs was super pleased with our responsiveness and support during the Propel implementation and beyond.
• With Propel, JUUL Labs is already experiencing high user adoption, increased productivity and higher throughput. For example, with Propel, it’s so much easier to find the information you want. End users or suppliers don’t have to be super familiar with product data to find what they want. They can just search a la Google, and they can find whatever BOMs, items, files and changes that they want.
• Propel’s flexibility and ease of use makes it easy for suppliers to collaborate with JUUL’s team. Suppliers don’t have to deal with complicated VPN limitations. They have their own restricted views of product information, but they can use Chatter to engage in real-time product discussions. For example, a supplier can suggest alternates to long lead time items, @ mention specific individuals and groups, and the JUUL team can incorporate those changes faster than ever before.
• David also highlighted the mobile capabilities for Propel. While no one expects someone to create full BOMs on an iPhone, Propel does make it easy for executives to access the product information they need, review changes and quickly approve them on the go.

Check out David’s interview here.

Originally published at www.propelplm.com on February 1, 2018.