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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August 17, 2023
Arena - More than a supplier-customer relationship!
Arena is used throughout the company and by most departments and all our divisions, here and abroad. It is also used by our assembly partners for parts selection and supply chain planning. Being a cloud-based solution, Arena permits many gains in time and timeliness of communications while keeping everything available to everyone at anytime anywhere. By communicating designs in real-time, Arena permits us to not only save time but reduce errors and roll out better designs faster. Time to market is key, and Arena has helped us with this. Really appreciate all the help so far, keep up the great work!
- Having partners and suppliers be part of ECOs throughout their lifecycle
- Sharing procedures and documents in real-time anywhere at any time
- Provide a secure area for our documents and designs
- Ease of use and support
- Some mass edit features could be added, such as changing suppliers in sourcing for all affected parts when a semiconductor company acquires another company but keeps the same part numbers...currently parts need to be changed individually.
- It has reduced our New Product Introduction time by releasing BOMs, parts, and documents faster and more efficiently to all our suppliers and partners simultaneously.
- Time to market has been faster and more efficient also; processes and procedures are clear and easy to follow.
Arena support and help have been tremendous since our partnership began. Doug J. and Joshua R. have been key players with supporting Trilliant and adding value to Arena by providing innovative solutions, tips, and shortcuts and adding tools to improve our efficiency and our ability to harness some of the power that Arena has. This allows us to tap into Arena's powerful features that would otherwise be unknown or would have taken a lot more time to find. They have given us the trust and confidence to reach out and to continue to use Arena more and roll it out through more users at a faster pace and with a better payback to us. It has been and continues to be a WIN-WIN relationship. Many thanks to all Arena support personnel for all their continued help and assistance.
Arena's implementation was done fast and seamlessly. We had assistance throughout all phases and the implementation was with us at all steps of the exercise. The implementation was done on time and roll out through facilities was done effortlessly. As always, Arena provides great valuer for the money,
I was not involved with SAP when it was evaluated but feedback from others SAP was chosen without full knowledge of ARENA's capabilities in these areas.
Yes Arena does a good job in covering these areas. all of these are covered but we mainly use the RoHS, REACH and ISO features which are easy to use and make our re-certifications easier and faster with registrars.
Arena being Cloud based made the transition painless and seemless for us. We could communicate in real time with out supply base and teams 24/7 which was highlighted even more with the pandemic.
Users have more than doubled in the 12 years we have implemented ARENA. We integrated Silicon Expert as an add on to help with parts lifecycle and procurement. Partners and preferred supplier trippled in this time and their integration was also quite fast and seemless. All of these expansion/transition have become more and more efficient and quite easy to do.
Quality, speed, ease of access, security and good communication are not options; with ARENA you get it all at a high degree.
Always positive and customer oriented, always on point.
75
Supply Chain, certification, Firmware Engineering, Software Engineering, Quality support, Hardware Engineering, Electrical engineering.
5
Technicians, engineering managers and engineers
- Different suppliers and partners access
- Integration of merger and acquisition entities database into Arena
- Fast and easy roll out of licenses at overseas locations
- Recognition of Arena when applying for ISO certification/renewal
- Use of Arena in conjunction with other software/tools such as SolidWorks, Silicon Expert, etc.
Introducing new product lines/new business unit integrations. We have had 3 major product integrations in the past 5 years, all of which were different in their challenges and from where we started. Arena was able to analyze our different needs and propose alternate solutions adapted to our needs. Most of these have increase the speed in which we were able to input parts/documents/BOM's and data from different systems and software. In some cases, we even had special tools developed on the fly especially for us which were life savers for us, one experience come to mind when Doug Johnston from Arena, developped a quick dBase tool that permitted us to load new parts and BOM's quickly and efficiently from an Archaic Excel format!
May not be advanced bu the redline and compare features are very useful when customers ask for differences from different revisions or to make sure ECR and ECO's have been properly implemented and that nothing was missed.
Use and experiment with the advanced Arena filters. These offer a myriad search options using logical operations. One can literally find anything in Arena with 2, 3, or 4 filters...we have in the upwards of 30K different parts and BOM's in ARENA and we use these several time a day to quickly find (in less than 30 seconds) any component, part, document....etc that is part of our ARENA huge database.
Yes
We were using back in 2007 Lotus and Excel to do most of our PLM...needless to say that ARENA was a MAJOR upgrade for us!
I would probably recommend to my management to skip a few of the other PLM providers we evaluated and narrow it to 2 or 3, including ARENA in the selection process!
- Implemented in-house
Yes
Trial, test and production.
Change management was a big part of the implementation and was well-handled
None that I remember, everything was done smoothly and effortlessly.
- Training
- Getting used to the environment.
- Online Training
I think ARENA PLM is already at the best practices level IMO!
Some - we have done small customizations to the interface
To get reports and applications we did not have and it was easy to do with the expert help from ARENA!
No - we have not done any custom code
None that comes to mind.
Yes
In some cases where time to market is of essence, if we do not have a direct path to the solution we will ask ARENA support team...in 90% of these cases, our ARENA support team or Joshua Robbins, Doug Johnston and Lori Austin have chipped in and given us the solution free of charge. In some more technical and time sensitive issues, we have required and payed for premium services and every time we did, Trilliant got their moneys worth and more. Arena support team are extremely knowledgeable, efficient and will go the extra mile to satisfy us. Time and money wisely invested...my two cents!
Yes
Only once that I can remember and it was due to an internet provider issue...it was quickly resolved.
Several times but once that occurred late last year. We needed to have parts that were OBSOLETED but that appeared ONLY in OBSOLETED and Abandoned BOM's. We worked with Doug Johnston who assisted us in outputting a huge data file which with his assistance, could filter out non needed parts and get to OBSOLETE parts THAT were ONLY contained in OBSOLETED parts. The process was even automated to get it downloaded in our ARENA dashboard automatically once a month. By doing this, we were able to effectively and quickly remove obsoleted parts from our inventory and from our partners inventory.
- Searches with Advance fucntion
- BOM Compare
- Redline feature
- Searching for ECO title in an ECO list opened in a screen...ECO title width limited and truncates part of the title
March 22, 2023
Arena PLM & QMS - Stellar Product
Arena PLM and QMS is used primarily by the Operations, Engineering, Product Development Teams, along with our CM Partners. Arena ties all of our departments together to ensure everyone is on the same page with our product development, launch to market, and most importantly continual improvements. Without Arena, there would be no control as to how our product is configured and ultimately this could result in severe loss of revenue, lessen our consumer confidence, and our Quality team would find it very difficult, almost impossible, to track potential issues and risks.
- Extremely easy to configure, not cumbersome or overpowering, big plus with todays technology, meets your individual companies needs
- Onboarding Suppliers and CMs extremely effective ensuring our communication strategy is on track
- Cloud based, portable, access from anywhere, with no constraints
- Communicates in easy to understand nomenclature, straight forward, concise and clear
- Users can easily access information basically at their fingertips, without deep dives to try to find what they need. Tying reference items to each other ensures all the needed documentation is in one place.
- Would be nice to be able to add graphics and images on the change order specification page, for better clarify
- Implementation of a change after it is effective is lacking visibility, and has to be managed manually
- QMS could be a bit more streamlined, so there are not so many steps
- When an upgrade is done, it can change areas where you were not expecting to be changed and it may not be something I wanted changed
- When configuring an advanced supplier to an item, if that supplier is already configured, they should not show up as a new selection
- Duplicating an item, where the same supplier is used has an error when it is selected, few too many steps are added to get the results needed
- When adding users or suppliers to a change, their whole account information takes up a good majority of the screen, this is not needed, only the user name should be visible for easy access
- Approvers or comments only personnel used to be very easy to add, employees and suppliers are now separated, more steps involved, when it used to be simple and consice
- Our overall business objectives have improved ten fold, information has been communicated quickly and most importantly effectively
- Ensuring on time delivery of product to market, coinciding with our announcement of our product launch, no delays
- Quality has important information at their finger tips and can supply to needed departments quickly, and effectively, items are clearly defined and traceable
- Company information is all in once place, not on personal computers, or on a server that only a few people can access, tradeoffs are tremendous to ensure the integrity that the information stored is correct, and easily available
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Product Reputation
- Prior Experience with the Product
Myself and my director had used [Arena PLM and QMS] at other companies and were thoroughly impressed. Selecting Arena was like riding a bike again, no learning curve, look and feel was the same, no new training needed. Very easy for users to navigate, and training was a breeze. Same stellar support staff at Arena, questions answered quickly and clearly. Features are not too overwhelming, clearly state what is about to happen,
Yes, initial implementation was easy, Arena staff was stellar in ensuring information was imported correct. It was implemented as promised, on time, no hiccups, no issues, no problems at all. I was extremely satisfied with the entire Arena implementation team, and support after was equally stellar, they were there anytime I needed them.
I've used SAP, Agile in the past, for PLM, and unless the server is in your office, you cannot configure anything, and should it crash, you as the client are stuck until the issues are resolved. In my 15 plus years using Arena, there has only been one instance where the server was down, and the support team quickly resolved the issue with no loss or data or breach of any kind. Both PLMs are very light on what you can configure for your own company, most of it is out of the box, and you are stuck with it, whereas Arena Solutions gives you much more freedom to really tailor it to your company's specifics and what works for you.
Indirectly, we capture all reports and pertinent documents only.
Arena can be access from anywhere, so the transition to WFH was very easy, no down time, or issues, room at my home became my work office in an instant! We were able to Zoom and share screens to talk about just about everything going on in Arena and elsewhere
Brought on board more CMs, expanded approval teams, and more new users as well. Added to our categories, created attributes specific to our business and the needs we have
You will not be disappointed!!!!
A bit limited at the moment, email tag back and forth for now, not sure I communicated clearly an issue I was having, and it is something only a document control person would understand, my success coach did not understand, maybe they have never used the product? Might be a good idea to have them do this, so they can better answer and address the issues their customers encounter
Since I had used it in a previous company, I knew its benefits, and was able to communicate them to my peers and get them excited about it as I was. Just dive in, the water's fine!!! Don't be afraid to configure a new path with something, it's all continual improvements!!
Opening multiple browsers with Arena in each one, makes it easier to toggle between items and changes or look for information, and not forget what I was working on. The items tab in an item, you can add another item as a reference, this is great for CMFs, reports, just about anything, this way it does not have to be on the BOM, but shows anything related to this item, I love this!
Get in there and go for it! Do not be afraid, try it, see if it is what you thought, if not, change it back, I typically keep a record of what the original change was for reference
No
I would not change anything, Arena is stellar, and I already knew the advantages, so it was a no brainer to select them, win win for everyone!
- Implemented in-house
Keep it simple and concise,not too many players either
- Dotting t's and crossing i's
- Reviewing the legacy data to ensure it's accuracy
- Not everything was setup as I thought it would be
- Had to do back ground configurating, and some didn't work as I expected
- Online Training
Just try something and see if it does what you thought it would do, if not, you can always change it back. I typically keep notes of what I am changing, in case I need to change it back
No - we have not done any customization to the interface
No - we have not done any custom code
We have not done any
No, did not, as the current support system in place is stellar, never an issue with resolving any issues I encounter, or if there is something I would like to see if it can be done, they pass on to their product team for consideration.
No
Sure, we had a new product in development, and we did not want to share the particulars with the entire user group, so Arena suggested creating a new workspace with only the select few users who needed to see the information. They walked me through the whole process and I was able to proceed with this new product moving though the design process, with very little downtime or snags, it worked beautifully, and it was a win win!
- Item creation, creating new categories, creating new users, creating new approval groups
- I was asked to generate a list of our top level part numbers in Excel, not the BOM, just the part numbers, and after my search, was able to export these found items, and whalah, success!
- Basically exporting a BOM in Excel, pick and choose what I do not want to show, it's great, or if I needed a quick BOM for reference, can create it in PDF form
- Adding suppliers to a change for approval, along with users, too many clicks to get the desired result
- The Reports tab, really hard to get my desired results, so I don't use it
- The quick search bar is gone, lots of wasted space now, where in the past, everything was across the top, now, it's drop down, and not very user friendly
- Compliance, so we don't use it
- None at this time
N/A
- Yes, Solidworks
Not at this time, I contacted them, and said possible 6-9 months away
None
N/A
Number of users for discounts, maintenance afterwards
Not at this time
Yes
We had no choice, upgrades are automatic, and we have to take them, and cannot reverse them. This last one was not too good, as it removed some things that I used on a daily basis, our users were a bit confused, and I had to enlighten them, after I figured out what the upgrade did. It was not well received in our organization
- None that I can think of
- Hoping that some of the feedback I sent will be taken seriously and implemented
No
No