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, …
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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…
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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
(151-175 of 200)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Our company uses Arena as a change request and document control [tool]. We use it across our Engineering, Marketing, Operations, and Customer Service/Repairs departments.
The company is small enough that we use the Request process as a means to purpose changes and assign tasks in regard to the changes. We then use Changes to track tasks and their completion. Once these changes are complete our service and operations departments use Arena for up to date documentation.
The company is small enough that we use the Request process as a means to purpose changes and assign tasks in regard to the changes. We then use Changes to track tasks and their completion. Once these changes are complete our service and operations departments use Arena for up to date documentation.
- Arena does a great job allow customization of records to meet the needs of our company
- Arena is excellent at providing a clear flow and link between records.
- I would like to see improvements made to reports. It's not always apparent how a report is built, and sometimes it's difficult to just get the raw data out that you want without piecing several reports together.
- Developing and sharing searches isn't very intuitive, and the tools for crafting a search are often difficult to use.
- I would like to see more tools involving assigning tasks that are related to moving a request through the change process. This way our team can collaborate through Arena instead of relying on other collaboration tools for assigning tasks related to going live with a change.
October 05, 2018
Arena is a powerful tool for our business
We store all of our PLM data in Arena. We control our BOMs and Drawings with ECOs and use the approval process to get approval from stakeholders in 3 different countries. We have quality data and use it for storing all technical reports.
- Searching. The advanced search is very flexible yet guided to narrow down a search to a short list when you are trying to find something
- Our migration from Agile and Parts and vendors was complex, but well supported. The transition team met with us weekly and responded quickly to our concerns and issues. Our experience may have been extreme, but Arena stood by us and helped us navigate many tough situations.
- Administering and reconfiguring the database is very straightforward and quick. I love the fact that an Engineer can come to me and say, "I need this new parameter for a capacitor" and I can resolve his request in 2 minutes.
- I find it frustrating that the filtering or logic for searches and for reports is different. A database query is a database query and I should have the FULL range of options (like looking for NULL values) everywhere, or using NOT in search logic, or using OR in search logic (available sort of, with the ANY search, but not in Reports)
- Extracting reports from the Quality world is very awkward. Because the details are stored with the field name in a long list, there should be CROSSTAB QUERY functionality built in to Arena that will allow me to extract data in a tabular format instead of a long list of different fields and data. [I currently have to take the output from Arena and put it into MS Access where I perform a CROSSTAB QUERY to reformat the data to a grid with each field in a different column.
- I would really like to see the functionality (well controlled) to allow Attributes to be DECOUPLED from Revisions, like the recent addition of Cost. I would like to be able to have an Inventory qty attribute for each of my factories, so that the Engineers have some sense of what is on hand when obsoleting a part. It goes beyond that and My intent is to have weekly uploads (refreshes) of Inventory data from the ERP systems used in our different facilities into Arena, where more people in the organization have access.
October 05, 2018
Arena is all you need!
Arena is being used to document product changes between our ODM and Engineering Team. It is also being used to manage Quality System-related documentation.
- Ease of use
- Price
- Data hosting is part of price
- BOM attributes need to be imported.
October 05, 2018
Easy to use Bill of Material Control is a snap!
Arena is used by the Program Management, Engineering, & Purchasing departments with approvals by other department heads as needed. It helps as a cross-functional tool that everyone can access to see bills of materials, supplier information, etc.
- Control of bills of material
- Access from many devices/not tied to a company server
- Ease of use
- No associated mobile app
- Using Arena on a mobile device is difficult
- Lack of user defined visual settings (i.e. I would like to change colors for different bom items - yellow highlights for plastics, green for electronic components, etc.).
October 05, 2018
Relatively New Arena User's Experience
Arena is used mainly for corroboration between engineering and manufacturing organizations for the fabrication of items that we design.
- Keeping a snapshot of a particular assembly of parts at a given moment in time is the main function that we rely on from Arena.
- Arena helps us build a library of parts that can be searched and cataloged properly
- Navigation is still a task that requires power-user level of understanding. I would love a simpler way to see a clearer picture of my products, perhaps even a top-down diagram for each product, and an easy way to find the top level of each.
October 03, 2018
Arena user experience
We use Arena to keep track of the production of our products, from components to PCB and finished products. It solves issues like having multiple sources of information.
- Managing parts and its history, sourcing and specifications on one central place
- Clearing out all links from a finished product to the smalles components
- Giving restricted access to manufactures
- Managing changes and the approvals around changes applied on every item inside your Arena account.
- Quicker and more intuitive user interface
October 03, 2018
Arena... 6 months on.
It's primarily used by the Hardware Engineering and Production teams for part specifications, BOMs approved suppliers etc. Also have linked major suppliers with access to view up-to-date information. The request functions are also used by Product Management to request changes.
- Links between requests, changes, and parts are easy to view and audit.
- Files are easy to attach for engineers and easy to find for everyone.
- Notifications for changes and required actions are sent to the right people.
- BOMs... Too many standard BOMs that don't show you the whole picture. Sourcing, Costing, and Purchasing BOMs should NOT be 3 separate things.
- BOMs... customization to show exactly what you want (or exactly what a particular vendor requires) is simply not possible because the fields allowed for customizing your BOM are woeful
- Costs, especially with new designs, are too confusing for most users. We find it hard to view a rolled-up cost estimate for a new BOM because a sub-assembly somewhere got accidentally set to 'quoted + rolled-up' - which is useless and completely screws up costing.
- Options for exporting data. Assumption seems to be made that you will just set up your supplier with access to your Arena workplace and everything will work well. When you have a multitude of suppliers/vendors across the world speaking many languages and possessing different levels of technology, this is definitely not always easy. Some simple data I have been giving to vendors for 20 years are not easily available from Arena.
October 03, 2018
Wonderful
Arena is being used across the entire organization. It allows for traceability of documentation for compliance to regulatory agencies.
- creation of item types such as protocols, reports, etc.
- difference modules to support different aspects of the organization: training, engineering, etc.
- approval status and different approve routings
- fewer updates, as it requires a lot of paperwork/document validations on the organization
- improve notifications
October 03, 2018
Arena - a hassle free database and workflow tool
Arena is used by Engineering and Operations to build and track BOMs, store datasheets and design records, and communicate design information with our CEM.
- Arena has great support for migrating current data as well as uploading individual or bulk records into a new database. Our Solutions Architect worked with us at our pace and helped to import all relevant data with a minimum of extra work.
- Arena is straightforward and easy to use - its interface is intuitive and well thought out, and the tool does what you need it to do with a minimum of customization. Component categories, BOM structures, part numbering schemes, and component sourcing from vendors and manufacturers all worked great right out of the box.
- Arena allows clear and comprehensive control over updates and messaging as well as delivery of needed information to third party manufacturers. The administrator can set up in a straightforward manner who gets what and when, who has visibility, and an effective change release process.
- A large business with many different groups all having different needs and requirements might see limitations using Arena. Though this was not the case in my company, I have seen a previous company struggle to implement a competing product that required extensive customization.
- As a small company, my company would get better use out of Arena if the per-seat licensing cost were lower. We are currently unwilling to pay for a license for the people who would be a 'nice to have' in accessing data but don't particularly need to create or edit information.
October 03, 2018
Arena fan
We are using Arena as document, BoM, quality, training, and project management. Since we have changes integrated with our ERP system with its very expensive licenses, it is by far the most universally used tool from technicians on the production floor to engineers in the middle stages of design. The BoM control and Training Management module in particular have been key in smooth ISO audits.
- BoM control is intuitive and easy. Importing works beautifully. The previous system we used was a BoM control disaster.
- Training management has made tracking our training nearly painless. This was key in our recent audits.
- Quality processes and their easy links to suppliers, supplier items, items, changes, requests, and other quality projects is a very powerful tool.
- The training management module does not have a built in way to drill down to see and individual user's training record. This seems like an easy feature to add.
- No way to link fields/dynamically populate forms. I'd like to be able to choose from between, say, Medical and Commercial and have only the fields necessary for that device type be required or shown.
- More flexibility in reports - tying modules together would be very useful.
- Ability to customize views - choose columns to display in default view.
October 02, 2018
Great PLM system
Mainly used throughout engineering, quality, and operation. Marketing will use very little to control collateral. The rest of the company will use it for training only.
- Flexible
- Easy to use
- Training management is difficult. In the training world, there should be a "my assignments" button. The dashboard is too crowded and people who do not use it regularly often get confused.
- Configuration management does not exist
October 02, 2018
Arena, it does more than I need.
It is used by a single team, the engineering team, to manage BOMs and AVLs. The rest of the business uses Windchill for document management and as a pseudo-PLM. QAD and SAP are used as ERP.
- Pulling information from parts vendors such as Digikey and mouser
- Managing 1: many part relationships
- Change management
- Formatting BOM exports. Today, there is no way to export a BOM that looks like the sourcing view of the BOM in Arena
- Having different revisions of a component in different BOMs. To my knowledge, there is no way to have rev 1 of component A in one BOM and rev 2 of component A in a different BOM
October 02, 2018
Arena Basics
We use it across our whole organization from development to production for tracking product BOMs.
- Documenting and providing a change history
- Flexibility in creating your own templates
- Too many steps needed to add a part to a BOM
- Would like more flexibility in creating templates, specifically routing for approvals
October 02, 2018
Helped us Improve our Change Control processes tremendously!
Arena is being used primarily by our Product Development/Engineering organization for document and product design change control. We do have other read-only users throughout the organization (especially in Customer Service) that can access documents by clicking on Arena smart links that are copied into other applications, such as into our ERP system. We also have an API integration running between Arena and our ERP system NetSuite, to assist in automatically creating items and BOMs in NetSuite as they are released or revised from Arena.
- On many screens, there are multiple options to do other things, such as attach items just created to requests or changes. Each screen has a lot of buttons or commands that can be executed from there, rather than going back to another screen to start doing something else.
- The Bill of Material expand/collapse options are very useful, and the ability to see at a glance whether items have other pending changes is great. It helps us either consolidate several changes or process them in a specific order as may be appropriate.
- The request and change worlds are easy to use and configure. We have reduced our engineering change cycle time using these features.
- The Reporting module is seriously limited, and really only allows the reporting of rather basic information and from only one module at a time (for example, I have to pull data separately from the requests and then the changes module), then link resulting spreadsheets together to get overall cycle times for our engineering change control process.
- The Help system should be improved with more details. For example, a recent new feature of using multi-select attributes should be explained in the help section and examples described on how to import data to multi-select attributes.
- For PDX exports of changes, the FILTER option is still not available. This is very valuable to my company to allow us to filter out files/items contained in changes that are for internal consumption only, that we don't want to share with external parties.
- The API integration capability is under considerable scrutiny at my company. We deployed it to integrate with our ERP system and it has been a disappointment, to say the least. Not reliable. It takes too long before data transfer can be verified. We are currently considering other options.
October 02, 2018
My review of Arena
Arena is being used by the organization to track configurations of various items developed by the company. The feature that is used most in Arena is the Bill of Material feature. The Bill of Material feature provides a concise list of items required for our contractors to build each one of the items.
- Bill of materials for assemblies
- Development of change orders
- Ability to use the same items in different product assemblies
- An easier way to export a bill of materials
- An easier method to add users
- An easier method to add items to the category tree
October 02, 2018
Arena Rocks!!!
We use Arena to control our design and guideline for the production of our product. Used by the entire organization.
- User-Friendly
- Intuitive
- Flexible
- Ability to flag and pass the information through integration is limited.
- Export formats are not easy to use.
- Not always able to export into format custom attributes across worlds. I would like to search all aspects of ECO's and customize the data I can export.
October 01, 2018
Review of Arena in a Tech Design to Manufacturer Environment
Our company utilizes Arena across the entire organization for change management, BOM management, DHF, and vendor compliance.
- Easily customizable routings for change approvals.
- Quick access to design files associated with BOM items.
- User friendly dashboard for "light" use approvers and viewers.
- Good controls over limiting access to features by user type.
- Search features can be tricky depending on how you search by different criteria.
- Limited customization on certain pages prevents custom fields to be put in locations where they could be more helpful depending on the user type.
- Configuring reports and BOMs is challenging for new users.
October 01, 2018
Arena solutions to business system management
My team uses it for supply chain management of various products, whether in testing phase or large rollouts. It’s good at allowing us all to review documents, control revisions, and only use approved documentation when working with our vendors.
- Can manage multiple products and multiple projects concurrently for different teams and tests.
- Tracks documentation and allows others to review it prior to submission.
- Keeps logs of changes to gather product behavior learnings and apply forward.
- Can be challenging for some staff in the beginning.
October 01, 2018
Still not implemented in Year 2
Arena is still being implemented, as we have struggled getting our data set up cleanly and getting Arena to communicate with our ERP system. We are on year 2 with no cross-functional use.
- We are hoping it will help us with Rev control of drawings.
- We are hoping it will become our central database of all current drawings and design documentation.
- It will help us manage inventory transitions between versions of material.
- We do not yet have experience to provide that feedback.
- I would recommend that you provide more assistance with set-up, std with initial fees. Also, perhaps recommend fewer licenses while set-up is in process as that takes a long time for smaller companies with fewer resources. We have spent a lot of money with no ROI yet.
October 01, 2018
Arena PLM is da BOM
We use Arena for BOM management, change control, and to communicate those items with our contract manufacturers. Our Engineering Department creates and manages the BOMs. Our IT Department translates those BOMs for use in our ERP system. Our Operations Department references the BOMs to build products, to order contracted products from our Contract Manufacturers, and to manage inventory. Our Accounting Department also references the BOMs for costing and inventory purposes.
- Notification of required decisions relating to ECOs and BOMs.
- BOM management.
- Where it's used: being able to see what assemblies and sub-assemblies use a given part.
- Control of automatic updates to our ERP system - we use a manual process because it's so much easier to manage.
October 01, 2018
Arena, The Essential Electronic Design Assistant
My company needed a tool for managing its database of bills of material and their electronic components that enables us to perform the following functions:
1. Maintaining the approved vendor list for each component.
2. Generating BOM on demand by directly interface with our CAD system.
3. Collaborating design effort between different engineering departments for optimal design cycle.
4. Sharing information between cross-functional teams for project planning/executing with efficiency.
1. Maintaining the approved vendor list for each component.
2. Generating BOM on demand by directly interface with our CAD system.
3. Collaborating design effort between different engineering departments for optimal design cycle.
4. Sharing information between cross-functional teams for project planning/executing with efficiency.
- Providing means of generating accurate PCBA BOMs from our CAD system.
- Keeping track of our electronic component approved vendor list.
- We have yet figure out on how to make BOM item numbers non-consecutive, e.g. 5, 10, 15, 20 vs. 1, 2, 3, 4, due to the dynamics of our business requirement. The skipping of item numbers allows space to add new items without reassigning item numbers for existing components therefore minimizing document/drawing update.
October 01, 2018
Easy Peasy
We use Arena for the Quality Systems. We use it for Part Control, BOM Control, Document Control, Training, NCR, CAPA. Management Review, Design History File, Risk Management File and Usability.
It helps to build our quality systems as well as supports Design V&V activities.
It helps to build our quality systems as well as supports Design V&V activities.
- It has very detailed Part/BOM control that works really well even for the most complicated medical device.
- It's very user friendly and easier to navigate through out the whole site.
- Assigning Users/Disabling users in Arena is pretty convenient based on company's always changing needs since Admin is able to perform this quicker.
- The training world needs a whole lot of improvement. It's difficult to access records and pull reports by individual employees. Also, it doesn't let admin give an exception (excuse) for assigned training.
- Document Management can be improved to make document control functionality much more efficient.
- Reports can be improved by giving lots of attribute options to select from. Very minimal information currently can be pulled out which makes pulling reports a little bit frustrating.
September 24, 2018
Small company review of Arena
We are in the process of launching its use within the Ops department and expect to roll out to the entire organization. We have challenges with the following and expect Arena to address all these areas:
- Product information not housed in a central location, accessible by all
- Changes not tracked or tracked in a timely manner to suppliers, internal team
- Constant changes to product definition and costs without visibility to stakeholders
- Individuals not held accountable to deadlines, tasks that affect others
- Product information not housed in a central location, accessible by all
- Changes not tracked or tracked in a timely manner to suppliers, internal team
- Constant changes to product definition and costs without visibility to stakeholders
- Individuals not held accountable to deadlines, tasks that affect others
- "Where used" function in the bill of materials is a fast way to see the impact of any change
- "Compare" function in the bill of materials is a convenient way to pick out the differences across SKUs that look the same at the top level
- Search capabilities are robust. If you know how to use them, you can locate anything.
- Maybe I just haven't discovered it, but I want to be able to capture the cost by supplier for each item, and have it roll up to the top level total cost of goods for a finished product.
- It is too easy to have duplication of parts or files which causes clutter. A person has to know exactly how to find something to add to a BOM. It is too easy to conduct a search poorly due to lack of knowledge, assume the part/file doesn't exist, then create duplicates for no reason.
- Email messages that deploy to Approvers, etc. are rudimentary and not easy to read. It is a turn off for people who expect HTML, visually pleasing email messages. If not easy, familiar to read, they will not spur quick action.
September 24, 2018
Great Product - Needs Polishing
We are using it in the manufacturing control process of ME and EE.
- Syncing between CMs in Asia and our ME and EE departments here in the States.
- Documentation of rev control and file management.
- I'd like to have control of what columns I see and the order in which they are arranged. For instance, on a BOM the item PN and description are next to each other which is standard but the item quantity is on the opposite side of the screen. The PN and quantity are the most important pieces of data on the screen so it is not useful to have them one foot apart. Most of my users have complained about this.
- Reports could be easier to use and more dynamic. This may be my inexperience with them but I and my team have a lot of trouble getting the report to pull the correct data.
September 24, 2018
Arena PLM Review
Arena is being used across the entire organization including field operations and select external vendor partners to communicate engineering and documentation changes. Our organization has multiple locations across the country and Arena (as a cloud PLM) provides for an easy and very effective means of communication.
- One of the benefits of using Arena is that it is a cloud based PLM system which allows you to access it from anywhere when needed and is supported by different devices such as an iPhone or iPad.
- Another benefit of using Arena is its ease of use. Arena is intuitive and any new user should be able to learn his/her way around the system after learning some of the basic commands and navigation features.
- Arena is also a flexible system with respect to revision control. The user is able to manage revision control as needed for a part or assembly and is not automatically set as with other PLM systems.
- I have no examples to write about at this time.