Arena - a great resource for document control and quality processes
My company uses Arena for document control and for managing quality processes. This includes employee training, change control, NCMR, …
Overview
What is Arena PLM and QMS?
Arena, a PTC business, helps companies to design, produce, and deliver innovative products with a unified cloud-based PLM and QMS platform. Arena understands modern product companies rely on distributed teams and global supply chains to develop products, ensure regulatory compliance…
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What is Arena PLM and QMS?
Arena, a PTC business, helps companies to design, produce, and deliver innovative products with a unified cloud-based PLM and QMS platform. Arena understands modern product companies rely on distributed teams and global supply chains to develop products, ensure regulatory compliance (FDA,…
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What is Arena PLM and QMS?
Arena, a PTC business, helps companies to design, produce, and deliver innovative products with a unified cloud-based PLM and QMS platform. Arena understands modern product companies rely on distributed teams and global supply chains to develop products, ensure regulatory compliance (FDA, ISO, ITAR, EAR, and environmental compliance), and respond to customer demands.
Arena states that they have more than 1,400 global high-tech electronics and medical device customers. Companies with complex products comprised of electrical, mechanical, and software designs need a single system to collaborate in real-time. Arena enables every participant throughout the entire product lifecycle to work together–increasing visibility and traceability. This helps to accelerate new product development (NPD) and new product introduction (NPI) by streamlining processes, automating review cycles, and reducing errors to increase profitability.
Arena PLM and QMS Features
- Supported: BOM Management
- Supported: Engineering Change Management
- Supported: Supply Chain Collaboration
- Supported: Quality Management
- Supported: Training Management
- Supported: 3D Visualization
Arena PLM and QMS Screenshots
Arena PLM and QMS Videos
Arena’s product-centric quality management system (QMS) software helps medical device manufacturers to deliver safe and compliant products to market faster. By connecting quality management processes to the product record, Arena helps distributed teams improve visibility and t...
Show More Arena PLM addresses modern product development challenges by bringing product information, people, and processes together into a single Cloud system to speed product development and commercialization. Through better visibility and enhanced collaboration, internal product teams...
Show More Arena PLM for AWS GovCloud helps companies that are subject to International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) and Export Administration Regulations (EAR) ensure defense-related technologies are controlled, and, if exported, are done so only with proper export licenses.
Siemen's Teamcenter (also sold by SAP), Arena PLM & QMS, and OpenBOM are some of the most preferred product lifecycle management tools by users.
Arena PLM and QMS Integrations
- NetSuite ERP
- SAP Business ByDesign
- SAP S/4HANA Cloud
- Microsoft Dynamics GP
- QAD Adaptive ERP
- Zendesk Suite
- SOLIDWORKS
- Octopart
- Expandable
- SiliconExpert
- Sage 100
- Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central
- Altium Designer
- 1Factory
- OrCAD
- Acumatica
- Jira Software
- FlowEQ
- Onshape
- Microsoft Dynamics AX, discontinued
- Salesforce Sales Cloud
- CADTALK
- Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP
- Razorleaf CLOVER
- Siemens EDA Calibre
- Green Data Exchange (GDX)
Arena PLM and QMS Competitors
Arena PLM and QMS Technical Details
| Deployment Types | Software as a Service (SaaS), Cloud, or Web-Based |
|---|---|
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
| Mobile Application | No |
Arena PLM and QMS Downloadables
Frequently Asked Questions
Oracle Fusion Cloud PLM, MasterControl Quality Excellence, and Teamcenter are common alternatives for Arena PLM and QMS.
Reviewers rate Support Rating highest, with a score of 9.5.
The most common users of Arena PLM and QMS are from Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Reviews
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November 19, 2019
PLM Manager
We use it to manage product items, BOMs, AVL/AML, and contract manufacturing. We also use it in change order control and change requests, and adjusting file attachments with version control. It helps with Rohs and Compliance certifications and integration to go to ERP.
- Revision control with redline.
- Making it unique for any industry with easy modifications.
- Workflows for Changes.
- Flexibility of data needs.
- We need more specific controls for contract manufacturers.
November 19, 2019
Arena PLM
Arena is our PLM with our customer. It is used across the entire organization, and allows us clear visibility with our customer to determine what processes/procedures aren't in place and allows us to implement them.
- Arena allows all of our documents (quality, process instructions, CAPA, etc.) to be located in one central place for quick access and retrieval from anywhere we have internet access.
- Allowing a smart phone application. It would be great to allow users to log into an application rather than having to go into the internet from their phone.
November 19, 2019
Short and simple.
Across the whole organization. Engineering uses it for doc control purposes. The official release drawings go to production for fabrication. Official release BOMs authorize the purchase of components.
We also use it extensively as part of our ISO certification, as it allows us to track out entire device history record. This includes customer communications, meeting notes, project schedule, and everything possibly relevant to the project. Having all of that on an online server is invaluable when working remotely.
We also use it extensively as part of our ISO certification, as it allows us to track out entire device history record. This includes customer communications, meeting notes, project schedule, and everything possibly relevant to the project. Having all of that on an online server is invaluable when working remotely.
- Controls documents in a revision-based system.
- Easy to ECO.
- Approvals are documented and dated.
- Better search functionality. Searching partials sometimes doesn't work too well.
- Ability to set all revisions to "unchanged" when doing an ECO, instead of having to manually set each one
November 19, 2019
Arena in a small company environment
We use Arena everyday for managing our product manufacturing and release process. It is used across most of the company, though it is used most by the engineering dept. It helps us keep track of the state for the multiple products in the manufacturing pipeline, allows us to communicate changes to our manufacturing partners, and access the information on currently released products.
- Allows access from any site. No need to install special software.
- Allows fairly fine-grained custom configuration of elements to help guide users in adding new Items and Files to the database.
- Does a good job of tracking inter-related items; for example when a high-level item with a large BoM tree is pushed to a new state (Design or Production), all items in the BoM tree are automatically checked to assure each is also in an compatible state. This means a high-level item cannot be released without also releasing all its components.
- There is likely no easy solution for this, but Arena is fairly complex software and there can be a learning curve for becoming comfortable with how it works. This is partly due to the flexibility it allows, which is a good thing. But flexibility and complexity often go hand-in-hand, as they do here.
- It would be nice if the Indented BoM view had a mechanism for expanding ALL sub-assemblies in one click--basically a "flat" view but with the "indented" organization, where all expansion "triangles" have been "opened" at all levels.
- In the Files world, the "Download now" when checking out a file does not always seem to download the file.
November 19, 2019
Straightforward PLM software
Arena is being used company-wide but mainly by the Hardware and Design department for tracking products, BOMs as well as NPI projects. It's a good tool for keeping track of any changes made during a product life cycle as well as sharing product/project information with customers and suppliers.
- Possibility of setting approval flows.
- Visibility of products across departments and cross-continent teams.
- Tracking of changes.
- Cannot be customized, it's a rigid software and cannot be adapted to all of our business needs.
- Doesn't auto-create item numbers upon new import.
November 17, 2019
Analytics and Quality Module has Room to Improve
[Arena is] Used by the hardware department for product lifecycle (ECO and BOM) management. Had been used for quality corrective actions for 1 year but found not cost effective.
- Easy to remember URL
- Highly configurable
- Single-sign on isn't handled well. A separate password is still required for signing ECOs that isn't sync'ed with the SSO password.
- Visibility to ECOs by vendors is handled person by person by ECO. When one vendor leaves their job and a new one comes on, access to each ECO must be granted individually...no clone of the previous person's visibility.
- Interface in the quality module can lead to confusion with users entering their information into the signature comments.
- Analytics for quality problems by vendor is needed.
October 14, 2019
Arena Review for a Startup company
We use Arena for our mechanical, electrical departments to fill up BOMs and issue releases of our finished and released BOMs. Once the BOMs are released we use it as our primary source to order the BOMs as well.
- Associating files to certain parts
- Creating BOMs
- Assigning costs and quoting information, also the breakdown of costs for each part
- I like the tab views under BOMs, indented, flat, sourcing, purchasing which I often use to verify BOMs quickly.
- Under Costing, Edit Costs, once I click on quoted or rolled up I have to wait for the whole page to reload and then save changes. I am not sure why the whole page refresh is needed when I select these options.
- On the BOM tab, it would be nice to add or remove columns that I need to view which are relevant to my purposes.
- Auto-caps for naming would be a nice feature to enable. We use all caps for naming of our parts.
October 14, 2019
Great for static-engineering/manufacturing processes, not so much for rapidly changing prototype environment.
Used by Engineering and Manufacturing teams to create and maintain BOMs. Additionally purchasing can access the saved BOMs for ordering.
- See where used for each item and purchasing and sourcing info all laid out clearly when BOM is created correctly
- Pictures can be added to each item
- Cost options, prototype and production
- Search! While searching for items with "Any" it cannot search our records extensive enough to provide a result. If I have a supplier number and search using any field, it gives NO Results, however if i search under supplier item number a result shows up. Shouldn't ANY field give a result?
September 20, 2019
Arena experience at EDI
Arena is used across entire organization at EDI. It is used for PN generation, storing design files, sourcing specification, building product BOM, ECO change management. It is our PLM system.
- BOM building
- Easy item creation
- Revision visibility and access to previous releases
- Easy supplier item creation
- No flexibility in customizing ECO routing, information cannot be updated once initiated
- BOM allows duplicate items instead of combining qty
- No flags for duplicate PN's linking same vendor item
- Changes module is not customizable to add SN or date fields in implementation
- Needs better EPR system tie-in or offer procurement module
- No low-cost read-only access, becomes expensive if used across entire organization
August 06, 2019
Things that Arena is the best at: Implementation, Features, Ease of use, and Collaboration
Arena is being used by Marketing, Sales, Support, S/W, Engineering, Manufacturing. We integrated all releases and documentation, across all departments. We can access the information remotely also with our EMS (Outsourcing Manufacturing).
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- Bill of Material, with all specs attached
- Release process (CCB, ECO process)
- Project mapping and Gating process
- Tracking by crossing any information in the database
- Ease of implementation, training and using the product
- More ERP capabilities, so we could use 100%, for prototyping Manufacturing without using external ERP system
June 28, 2019
Arena: An Auditor's Dream
Arena is used in our organization as a bundled solution for tracking change management, our QMS solutions, and training and compliance.
It is used for:
It is used for:
- All item (component level up to the SKU level) documentation (phase, revision and change control)
- QMS from our documented procedures and processes to utilization of the Arena Quality Module for several quality templates. The out of the box templates are easy to edit and others are easy to create.
- Supplier management allows for rating, supplier-specific audit traceability, and quality tracking.
- Training is a one-stop shop that records and provides a historical record for each employee. I like that this tool allows quizzes to be added which holds the employee accountable for actually reading and understanding the material content.
- Change Control allows for online CCB (no more scheduled meeting times) which is interactive and allows for a faster approval and release process.
- Quality management allows for identification of trends using analytics to extract the data for review.
- The Arena total solution moves auditors through the process in a "one-stop shop" that satisfies many areas of standard requirements such as ISO 9001 and others.
- Currently, in the automotive industry components, sub-assemblies and the system level assembly must meet rigorous standards. An example would be a component that must meed RoHS 3 requirements, AEC-Q testing requirements and others. These requirements must be identified and tracked and we were hoping to use the compliance tracking to do so. Unfortunately, we are only allowed to identify one type of compliance which is identified by a green check mark.
Arena is used across our organization to store our configuration data and to communicate to our internal and external customers.
- Allows for customization of configuration data to aid in locating items and to encourage component reuse.
- Supports a consistent change management system to ensure changes are effectively and consistently communicated to all stakeholders.
- Tracks data history and BOM configurations for reproduction of build configurations. Provides visual redline changes to clearly define updates to BOMs.
- Configurable licenses to allow for appropriate access for a variety of users.
- Supports communication with contract manufacturers with the ability to share data.
- We would like to see more options for the admin to do updates or exports of the configurations of our workspace to view categories/attributes in a spreadsheet all at once. Also to view licenses and policies of our users.
- I'd like to see the supplier custom attributes expanded to be able to support multi-select dropdown, similar to what you recently created for Items attributes.
- We are anxiously awaiting the ability to customize the "supplier rating" field to something other than "approved/disapproved/unrated."
October 23, 2018
Arena Review
We have all of our drawings, bill of materials with cost, supplier information and ECNs. Information is shared with production, supply chain, customer service, and quality.
- Maintaining BOMs with costs.
- Excellent training
- Having all drawings, BoM's and supplier information located in a single location.
- Make it easier to add and remove users.
October 16, 2018
Arena Survey
Arena is used as our document control database. All our controlled procedures and records are kept in Arena for everyone in the company to see.
- Multiple querying parameters available. This is great.
- Never had an intance of system being down.
- Have multiple modules that allow tailored made processes for different departments.
- Arena only accepts 1 picture per part number. This is a problem when we have substitute parts that look different but serve the same function.
- Arena presents documents in the same format they are uploaded to it. In my view, all downloads from a document controlled system should be in the form of PDFs.
- Not user-friendly to do reports and export data.
October 16, 2018
Arena PLM System Feedback For Perspective Users
Arena is currently used as hardware product lifecycle management tracking system. We use Arena to track hardware design, development, manufacturing builds, tests and monitor quality processes. Arena allow us to collaborate with suppliers and vendors to manage material. We also use it to manage products' certifications/compliance documentation.
- Data is stored on the Cloud. Data retrieving is responsive and convenient.
- Supplier access for collaboration
- Does not require high level of maintenance
- One of the major features an account admin should have is the ability to perform edit during ECO/ECR change review. It is a risk but the account admin should have the ability to determine the risk and update without rejecting the ECO in review with minor changes.
- Core default attributes are so generic and cannot be modified (renamed) to complement new custom attributes.
- Limit number of characters for custom attributes. I believe currently the maximum is 1000 characters.
- In several areas, the Arena system lacks the tracking history of activities of all Arena users. Examples: changes to requests and changes (ECR/ECO/FSR), users submit comments, emails notifications from analysts to suppliers, etc.
- Tracking users account history currently is limited to 6 months
October 16, 2018
Arena PLM Review
We use Arena throughout the company and also are working on getting our suppliers to use it. It has helped us address a lot of our product life management issues. It makes it easier to reference different revisions of our products for troubleshooting purposes. It also gives us an easily referable change process.
- Arena provides a centralized location for documentation the can be controlled.
- It provides good revision control of our products.
- It is customizable
- Customer support is very helpful
- The searching features can be confusing for the users not used to it.
- Changes should be downloadable in different formats than PDF.
- Would like to be able to be able to set ascending/descending order of certain info when importing BoMs.
October 12, 2018
Arena - CM to Grow With
Arena is used across our entire company for engineering and product documentation CM control and supplier revision control coordination.
- Comprehensive - We have not yet come across an issue where Arena did not have a solution.
- Flexible - We are able to build custom Attributes into our records to match our execution model.
- UI is not intuitive - User flow is not intuitive or similar to comparative tools or standardized tools. User interaction buttons are not consistent in location and descriptions are not effective in conveying interaction effects. Having said that, once you get past the learning curve the flow/interaction does make sense and becomes less frustrating.
October 12, 2018
Arena implementation better than my expectations!
We use Arena for all of our BOM management. It is used across the entire organization. All part numbers, bill of material revision control and engineering change orders are managed using Arena. Using Arena allows us to give all our employees visibility to changes and ensures all employees are using the latest revision of the files associated with any part number.
- Implementation of the product was fantastic. We worked closely with our solutions architect and he trained the team to understand the product fully. During the first part of the project, it was overwhelming learning all aspects of the product. We wondered why he could not just move all the information from our old system to Arena. As we moved through the process and the team had a better understanding of the product, it was apparent why Arena equips the user with the knowledge and wants them to be the experts in Arena. At the end of the process we were experts in the product and could fix issues ourselves and understand how we could better use Arena to manage our parts.
- Arena has not had any major bugs or issues with their software. The product works as documented and designed.
- The help videos and documents are very helpful and easy to access by anyone in our organization. They can help themselves, rather than relying on IT support.
- There were a few fields that we could not modify. They were standard fields that Arena would only allow specific data. It would have been nice to be able to modify the field and customize as we wished.
- We wish there was a shared user license. There are some users that might only use the product once per month. It would be nice if they did not need to hold their own user license to access information.
- When approving changes or requests, or completing a task in a project, it would be nice if the system automatically notified all down stream users with open items that the task was completed.
October 11, 2018
Easy to Configure
We are using it for document control, BOM's, Design History Files, quality management system, and limited inventory control. Also training record maintenance.
- Creating BOM's.
- Easy to configure for administrators.
- Quality workflows are easy to use.
- Training plans are not easily configurable.
- Change orders are easy to make mistakes especially when it comes to forgetting to change a field of an item.
- Seeing differences in items due to a change are not very apparent for approvers.
October 09, 2018
Good document control software and excellent validation support
We use it for approval and distribution of quality system documents and DMRs. We also used it to store scanned quality records for archiving. It is used by employees in the quality system. It addresses Document Control requirements for an IVD design and manufacturing company.
- Easy to learn.
- Great accessibility due to being web-based.
- Software validation support. In my previous company, I had to validate an enterprise document control software. Using Arena's validation package is so much easier.
- Support is great.
- Online training is great.
- I wish there was a way for the workflow to apply a watermark like "approved" and approval or effective date and pdf the native documents after approval.
October 09, 2018
Arena works well enough for a small team.
We use Arena to control mechanical and electrical design documentation for major releases into production. And then tracking ECOs. This is a lot better than using manual tracking with spreadsheets. Arena handles revision control, archiving, and cross functional communication.
- Each step has detailed context sensitive help text that is very useful for occasional users. We do not have a dedicated person for managing Arena.
- The hover over links provided in list views are very handy for reviews and first pass error checking.
- Functionality of the tool is easily changed to match the required and/or desired control an organization desires.
- Exporting data out of Arena to a vendor that does not have Arena access is not easy or obvious to set up.
October 08, 2018
Turn key easy to use PLC software
Arena is used in the Hardware department and it is used as documentation control system for parts and assembly as well as Quality and Compliance Documentation System. The main usage of Arena is documentation control system for products and Quality System documentation as well as quality related documents (SCAR, First Article, SPCR, supplier Audit, supplier AVL documentation,, etc.)
- Good graphic interface: very easy to navigate thought all the menus.
- Easy to customize fields: ability to add custom fields to any item and as well as develop new requests
- Does not require a lot of training since it is very intuitive: minimal training is required for the basic functionalities and the everyday work
- Limited Administrator power to change things once released: admin cannot go back a modify or reopen released items, changes or requests. This is a great limitation and increase the time it takes to create a new change. Sometimes the modification is irreversible.
- Very weak in the compliance solutions: the compliance section is almost useless. Very basic and very manual solution.
- Limited reporting capability: report capability should be able to export different scenarios, since the ability to see the info in the database on the video is very limited.
- Changes: administrator should be able to change inventory disposition throughout the sign off process, to correct or add more information, without the need to withdraw the entire change
- Total lack of Customer Management: no ability to manage customer specs or requirement nor the ability to create a separate database (like supplier). This is a big limitation for a company that sells or custom makes product for a customer.
October 08, 2018
Making it work with Arena
Arena is a used departmentally throughout our engineering groups. It addresses electrical, mechanical, marketing and operations.
- Control revision of the BOM.
- Update and control obsolete revisions.
- Maintain procedures and documents for ISO.
- During submissions I am unable to make changes unless ECO is withdrawn.
- Report lists should be broken into groups so that there isn't such a distance to the bottom just to click NEXT.
- Would like to have Quick Reports, either as standard or available to create with Shortcuts.
October 08, 2018
Good...
Yes, we are using Arena to organize our department and we are using it across other departments too. It addresses issues of BOM global control.
- Arena has an easy and simple user interface.
- It's good for BOM revision control.
- The database support for BOM exporting to another format is very complicated when compared with the other services like NetSuite.
- Arena should provide the ODBC when the customer needs to export the data for analysis.
October 08, 2018
Arena has been great fit for our growing company
We have used Arena since 2002... first in the US. It is now used in multiple sites round the globe... in the US, Mexico, China, Thailand, India, UK, Slovakia, Czech, etc. It is our primary tool to manage PLM, engineering changes, sharing of data with our suppliers, quality, and program management.
- Integration of suppliers, from around the world, into our processes.
- Management of engineering changes.
- Project management - we all have the "same version of the truth" for the status of a project.
- Improved integration of Arena to native CAD
- Improved integration of Arena to ERP