Jama Connect® is a Requirements Management software and Requirements Traceability solution. Jama Software enables teams to manage product requirements and enable Live Traceability™ across the development process, in order to reduce cycle times and improve product quality.
N/A
Arena PLM and QMS
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Arena by PTC is a cloud-based PLM and QMS platform. Arena helps product companies that rely on distributed teams and global supply chains to develop products, ensure regulatory compliance, and respond to customer demands.
N/A
Pricing
Jama Connect
Arena PLM and QMS
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Arena PLM Launch
Contact Sales
Arena PLM Enterprise
Contact Sales
Arena QMS
Contact Sales
Arena QMS Enterprise
Contact Sales
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Jama Connect
Arena PLM and QMS
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Required
Additional Details
—
Arena's cloud-based PLM and QMS solutions include role-based subscriptions to meet diverse team needs. Their fixed-fee QuickStart™ implementations supports rapid deployment.
I really liked Cradle as it seemed to be very full-featured. BUT, my liking for it was predicated on my being a daily user of the tool; it took me a while to get familiar with the tool. What was certainly true of Cradle in my experience was that it was VERY challenging to get …
Alternatives to Jama for us is Google Sheets. I have spent significant amount of time getting the team away from sheets as a source of truth. The added features of Jama has helped the team transition to Jama for the source of truth for requirements.
Arena was more intuitive and had a better interface and user experience than PTC Windchill, though Windchill was great as it had good CAD integration and the CAD PLM was the document PLM, everything was in one place. Windchill also had good customization workflow that …
For the past year, I had taken on the Jama Administrator role for my client and was able to quick learn how to configure the system to meet requirements and expectations of ASPICE, Functional Safety, and Automotive Cybersecurity as well as ISO 9001 and IATF 16949 standards focused on quality. Jama Connect is one of the most powerful engineering tools I've ever had a chance to use. It not only does exactly what's advertised and the customer service and technical support are Best-in-Class. For those who are searching for a Requirements Management Tool, I highly recommend you give Jama a try. They've got everything down to a science from the moment you start interacting with a Jama representative, to the training and the on-boarding. The learning curve was very quick for me, in large part due to the amazing technical support that I was able to receive from Jama's subject matter experts. Every person whom I spoke with about the tool and its capabilities was absolutely top-notch. If you really want to level-up your game, try Jama Connect Advisor. Get yourself a free demo. You won't find any better tool for Requirements Management!
Arena PLM is well suited for part number, BOM and file management. Processing changes (ECNs, ACOs, DCO's, etc.) in Arena is very easy to do and provides great visibility on the status of submitted requests. The ability to communicate with Suppliers and grant them access to files in Arena is extremely helpful. Arena does not appear to be the best suited system for managing software
Focus in the content without loosing the track of the evolution of the items by maintaining the exchange of information between the users inside the Tool.
The possibilities to integrate this tool within our IT-landcape and with our other engineering tools is for us a leverage to success.
It provides easy, 'login-anywhere' internet cloud-based access to fundamental PLM functions.
It provides secure access control for employees & vendors (but you pay per person for access licenses).
Data is effectively 'always backed up' in the internet-cloud.
There is an option to attach thumbnail graphics representative of each item and create a Bill of Materials view that also displays the graphics to help provide item recognition for BOM readers.
The 'filtering' capabilities in Jama are not as good as they could be. In particular, the ability to "nest" filters is quite limited. I have certain seen much better capabilities in other tools. ('Cradle' is an example of a tool with excellent "nested filters" capabilities.)
From an administrative point of view, the 'License' admin view is pretty disappointing. The particular thing that I'd like to be able to find out from it is the peak number of 'Float Creator' licenses in concurrent use on each day. If there's a way to get to that information, I haven't found it yet.
In my opinion, the Help Pages clearly do not realize that a picture is worth a 1,000 words; need illustrations and screenshots!
I think the 'Save' button when editing Quality Processes needs to "float" on the active page, not lurking at the bottom.
In my experience, the Arena PLM and QMS Training programs need to be revamped to include "real-world" examples and working through examples, not simply reading through a training manual.
Jama is really easy to use and operate compared to other tools. This allows a process owner to get easier buy-in from the organization to see value early. My experience with this tool was very positive and we were able to see value early in its introduction
We have so much time and effort invested into Arena. The history of approvals, revisions, etc. are necessary for many of our customers. We also have entire device histories recorded. Having to re-create that on another platform would be a feat requiring years of effort. But mostly, Arena just works. It's transformed our business into a much more streamlined system, resulting in a massive cost and time savings.
The requirements and baseline parts are easy to use. The review centre is very useable and understandable, once you understand/set up the moderation. (This last part could use some refinement.) Integration/connectability (the Connect part of Jama) is quite possible, but the useability could use some love as well.
Arena has improved their UI over the years that I've used it to make it more user friendly. Additionally, there is a lot of redundancy within Arena (multiple ways to achieve the same end), which makes it easier to learn.
It has always been available, except for preventative maintenance which is announced beforehand. Nonetheless, we experienced one day shortage over a miscommunication about payment.
Seems like when I need to access our workspace for an emergency situation, this is when maintenance is scheduled, just the luck of the draw, I guess, and I just wait until the maintenance is complete, and then can proceed
With performance compared to JIRA, I do recommend Jama in this case. Jama provides very good performance, it loads immediately for any of the items and searches any item immediately. Performance is really good in all of the operations including creating stories, epics, item types or other support operations or report generation.
They typically answer within minutes of posting a ticket, and then you have a clear expectation of what the issue is, how to diagnose it, how long will it take to get resolved, and in which version a given problem is resolved, or if there is a patch for hosted services. They have a number of support people, and all of them are top-notch.
Upon initial observation, Arena Solution appears to possess a rather intricate nature, yet this complexity was effectively navigated during the initial configuration phase with the invaluable assistance of an expert well-versed in Arena, a factor that greatly contributed to our comprehensive mastery and autonomous handling of Arena Solutions thereafter.
Helpful and exhaustive and tailorable for our needs. Instructor was well versed and engaged. Material was a good reference and was up to date with tool. Overall, in person training was valuable for tool introduction. Trainer was an active user of the tool and worked closely with other clients. So, very knowledgeable.
Easy to reference and understand. Updated routinely to include new topics. Online training evolves to include more advanced topics and how to guides. Online training includes videos and reference guides that make it easy to perform more complex tasks. Online training is free and can be accessed from any computer.
The On line training was easy to understand and was very efficient for most of our users. We used the training tools to make sure we use all of the features to their fullest and correctly! After a few weeks mos of our users were very proficient with ARENA PLM and were able to work on their own and use mos of the sections and PLM capablilities.
Jama 2015.5 implementation is very smooth and no need for much manual work. Jama 8 has many challenges and we can not install it as smoothly as Jama 2015.5. Initially, Jama didn't provide the Jama 8's installer files or zip files and they were just providing docker files to everyone (which was really strange). It is the worst that they don't provide all the files at a time. Why should they tell us where we should deploy, and why only a dockerfile? I am not very satisfied with Jama implementation.
It’s easier to use, easier to trace requirements and verification and has a better UI These other tools feel more like glorified excel sheets whereas Jama actually feels intentional with being an ALM tool.
As stated before tracing is much faster, creating the tracing matrix/workflow is easy like using a Miro workflow.
Arena is much better than QAD in terms of BOMs and ECOs and Revision Control. We use Arena concurrently with SAP and they integrate very well together, which is nice. The integration team was really helpful in making sure that the SAP to Arena functionality runs smoothly, and when there are any issues, they are very responsive to help make changes to fix the problem that might be there.
There is no horizontal scalability available in Jama, we have only one choice to scale it vertically. But vertical scalable applications always have limitations to grow. In this case, Jama doesn't support horizontal scalability functions like multi-node architectures with a shared drive for the home directory.
Arena is easy to customize and therefore easy to scale. Different user groups with access restrictions can be easily created and new training plans can be created to support different user bases. Suppliers can also easily be added or items can be shared with them
One experience that converted an engineer to using Jama Connect was an electronics engineer that was writing test plans. I showed them about how to write "unit" or very discrete tests and then showed them an automatic export to get the document. Thus the authoring of the document effort was taken away, they could focus on defining the test
Unfortunately I have very much struggled to embed systems engineering, requirements management and Jama Connect as part of the 'ways of working' outside the systems and electronics teams.
Decreased the company's time to market for release of its second generation flagship product.
Decreased the turn around on non-conformance reports (NCRs), supplier corrective action reports (SCARs), and corrective and preventative actions (CAPAs).
Better organized the company's process maps, DHF, and other regulatory related information so that major audits are completed faster and with fewer findings.
