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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- Competitors
- Tech Details
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- FAQs
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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March 03, 2020
Arena Review
We at Delphinus Medical Technologies, Inc. use Arena for product lifecycle purposes to keep track of all the documentation. It also helps us communicate with our manufacturing partners. I personally find it easy to use and had to go through minimal training. Reviewing and creating engineering changes is very convenient. I look forward to learning more about Arena and its usage.
- Generating BOM of assemblies and subassemblies is very easy.
- Easy to access the product history
- Creating engineering changes is very convenient.
- I'd be excited if it were possible to create documents in Arena.
- I would like to see some tutorials on how SOLIDWORKS PDM can be used with Arena.
- I would be excited if calendars could be integrated with Arena.
We use Arena as our primary resource for document control. It is very easy to use and adapt to our specific needs. We maintain all of our quality system documents as well as device master records and design history files, There are a lot of features, like BOM, that I use every day and they make my job a lot easier. I have used several PLM systems, and Arena is by far the most user-friendly.
- Search and Advanced Search
- BOM & Where Used
- Design and Engineering Change process is very easy, user-friendly, and intuitive
- Project Change Management
- I can't think of anything
March 03, 2020
Arena - One place to better manage your products
Being an engineering firm for Industrial Automation, we have different departments in the company such as Electrical, Mechanical, Controls & Robotics, Manufacturing, Quality, etc., and Arena is used by almost our entire organization. It is very useful and secure for maintaining our document database, change management, and quality management. This tool empowers us to maintain standardization across the company and being user-friendly it is easily accessible--anyone can pull up any documents or necessary information quickly. For a programmer like me, it's very handy to save configs for the drives, servos, scanners, etc. on Arena so that they are easily accessible across the company to anyone who needs to use them.
- Product management
- Project management
- Standardization
- I have struggled sometimes to search for items. Needs to implement better search functionality.
- BOM duplication is allowed which should not be the case as it needs to be handled smartly.
- The UI is sometimes misleading with multiple options. It can be revamped for a simple and better UI.
March 03, 2020
Arena viewed by a programmer
Arena is used by manufacturing, engineering, maintenance, and quality insurance. The whole organization uses Arena. It helps centralize everything on our products from engineering, manufacturing, installation and spare parts. This is where we can retrieve all previous and current versions of all subcomponents and a higher-level drawing of our system.
- Approval process.
- Keeping track of everything.
- Centralize all engineering documents and others.
- Source control.
- The interface is ugly. It looks like an 1990 web page.
- The search engine is powerful but complex.
- Program development feature. Programs versions and source control ex: git.
- Being able to compare program versions in text format and highlight changes between previous and latest version release.
March 03, 2020
Great for engineering and quality processes!
Arena is being used across the whole organization. I mostly use Arena for item creation, bill of material management, and quality processes. The whole organization also uses Arena to sign off on quality training documents.
- Web-based: It's great being able to access Arena from any device with an internet connection.
- Searching: Searching is powerful and easy. I can find what I'm looking for very quickly.
- Bookmarks: Bookmarks are a great feature that lets you return to any tab with a single click.
- The newest update seems to be slower than before. Pages seem to take longer to load.
- Would love to see a feature where you can copy items from one BOM to another. This would save a lot of time.
March 03, 2020
Arena is useful and helps to organize projects.
Arena is being used by my department to help with establishing a location in which multiple users and or departments can store data/ files. It is also being used as an organizational tool to help keep projects on their timelines and priories clear for the individual team members by use of tickets.
- Tickets can be set up in an organized manner and easily found
- Uploading and keeping track of files is easy with the file location and the drop to add box.
- Building a Bill of materials is quickly done.
- It takes a IT person to change specific things
- Some of the drop downs can be confusing
March 03, 2020
Fantastic Tool. Couldn't live without it once you try!
The whole organization is using Arena. It addresses document control and change control problems.
- Information was well organized
- Easy to learn to use even complex processes.
- System up almost 100% of the time
- Speed of operations
- When context-sensitive options are available, show them, and explain why they are not available instead of greying out the possibilities.
- All drag and drop functions.
March 03, 2020
Looks time consuming and a lot of work
Across the whole organization, Arena allows blocking design in production so every other department can start using them. Purchase, spare part, production. All the information about a part is transfer to Arena. To be in production, all departments have to approve it.
- Find a part or assembly related to another that is currently used
- Regroup all the information about a part
- Have a historic of defect part, by the supplier
- Adding file is long
- We have been able to ice revision for a particular project to know exactly what is where at anytime.
- Reviewing ECO is hard; see all the files and find the corresponding top ASSY while navigating in the ECO.
March 03, 2020
Arena is a great tool to keep all your drawings, documentation, and BOMs organized in one centralized location!
Arena is used across the entire division for all documentation, BOMs, and drawings. Arena used as a central repository for all the information and helps ensure there is revision control with all of our documentation. It is also used to track changes to any documents and drawings and record history.
- Intuitive
- Easy to Use
- Helps keep information centrally located
- Search can be a bit slow sometimes
March 03, 2020
Review of Arena
Arena is used as a database as well as a vault. Tasks to do are posted in there, and the material, bill of material, and files.
- Bill of material
- Links between files and changes
- Access to previous versions of revisions
- It is missing the option to know the inventory
- The new HUD is more struggle than helping
Arena is being used for Document and version control for all our Major documents such as Business Requirement Document, Engineering Requirement Document, and many more. Arena is also used for our Production Control, where we manage the Complete Life cycle of the product from Production to End Of Life.
It is being used by All departments such as Product Management, Program Management, Engineering, etc.
Arena helped in solving the problem of keeping a track record, which is a challenging task. Also, it helps in knowledge transfer with the right documentation in place. For example, if any important person leaves the organization without knowledge transfer, this tool with the right documentation helps in keeping a record of it and can be used as a source to learn the task which was left by the person leaving. Arena is indeed the best tool for Quality Control, Version Control, and others for Document or Product.
It is being used by All departments such as Product Management, Program Management, Engineering, etc.
Arena helped in solving the problem of keeping a track record, which is a challenging task. Also, it helps in knowledge transfer with the right documentation in place. For example, if any important person leaves the organization without knowledge transfer, this tool with the right documentation helps in keeping a record of it and can be used as a source to learn the task which was left by the person leaving. Arena is indeed the best tool for Quality Control, Version Control, and others for Document or Product.
- Arena helped in solving the problem of keeping a track record, which is a challenging task.
- Also, it helps in knowledge transfer with the right documentation in place, for example, if any important person leaves the organization without knowledge transfer.
- Arena has also helped in achieving ISO certification.
- It is also helpful in updating the BOM easily without much efforts and helps in keeping a track record of any changes made.
- The major disadvantage here is that it requires a lot of time to update the items.
- The DCO submitting process is lengthy and requires a lot of time if there is a minor update. There should be a way to update minor changes without withdrawing the whole change.
March 03, 2020
Arena Solutions - a great fit for a startup
Arena is being used across the whole organization for Document Control, Training, Quality Systems, and Manufacturing. The biggest problems addressed are Training Compliance - no more manual tracking of training. The ability to have multiple reviewers look at documents simultaneously when approving documents is a big time saver. The BOM management function is particularly helpful to revision control BOM components without impacting the finished good revision level.
- Training management is excellent - an automated, compliant system that pushes assignments to users is a big time-saver for the quality group.
- BOM management is super simple and allows for revision level control on components to be made easy.
- Compliance in document management is a big win—no more non-compliant server storage for document access.
- In automatically assigning approves, Arena could improve in allowing for some level of secondary selection. Too many people get notified unnecessarily on changes.
- There's no way to complete training outside the system or check off training done in the past.
- There aren't a lot of "If, Then" functionality you can add in (i.e., There's no way to say if the answer to a question is yes, require another question.) Lots of training has to go into system use to make sure it's done right.
March 02, 2020
Arena is a great and easy to implement PLM system
Arena is used in several of our business units; many with full PLM and integration to Oracle EBS, one business just using Quality. We have three more implementations scheduled for 2020, two in the US integrated with Oracle and one in Germany (med. device) integrated with SAP. Arena solves the issue of data being spread out in several locations, creating one single source of truth. As well as allowing integrated communication with product data and across multiple internal organizations.
- Links all data together in one central location and software system.
- Very easy to use and learn system and user interface.
- Provides great viability to proposed product changes and pending changes.
- Allows external sources easy and controlled access to needed data.
- True collaboration with external suppliers.
- Arena Administrator is not as user-friendly as the Stander user interface.
- Arena Administrator needs two levels so one level could add users, but not change the configuration.
- The standard PLM functionality, quality, and projects are great. Many of the additional modules need a lot of work to be worth implementing.
March 02, 2020
Its never too late to switch to Arena
It's used for the part list, manufacturing, drawing, and stocking.
- Arena supports me in terms of referring to the drawing as per the project. Since we are dealing with multiple projects, it's good to have Arena to organize the drawings as per the project list.
- Not enough filtering.
- Couldn't sort it out using custom controls.
March 02, 2020
Good for Product Life cycle Management
Across all the organization to manage product revisions.
- Link different product life-cycle management together.
- Keep documentation updated, helps manage drawing revisions.
- Managing tasks and approvals, provide visibility of who needs to take action and when.
- Helps document quality issues and link them to suppliers, part numbers, revisions, and changes.
- For ECOs linked to parts, it is not possible to print or download all related files at once. It is necessary to open one by one, not possible to do it in batches.
- When upgrading, a new revision does not keep user preferences and they have to be reconfigured (for example, view preferences).
We use Arena to manage documentation and sign-off periods such as stage gates.
- Store documents
- Authorizations
- Revision control
- Difficult for collab
- Expensive
- Offer CAD previews
Arena is used to serve as the engineering library of all parts, software and hardware which we use for every aspect of work.
- Serve as a Library store of information
- Upload files and forget they are there
- Search through super complex terminology as if it were 1993 on an old Windows 3.1 interface
- Search is so awful I prefer Excite, Web Crawler, or Yahoo from 1994.
- Finding anything requires a degree in Arena search terminology.
- Attaching a file is not simply add a file, it's a group of dropdown menus. Why has any person use this? This is only for paid Arena search specialists.
March 01, 2020
7 year and counting Arena Vet!
We use Arena as our primary PLM system across our entire organization. Arena serves as our single source of truth. Our revision controlled documentation is stored and accessed by all employees across all disciplines. We use SOLIDWORKS as our primary 3D CADD software and the Arena SOLIDWORKS add-in to integrate the two.
- Arena is relatively simple to use and understand.
- Arena has extensive capabilities and is enhanced and improved over time.
- Arena is web based so there is nothing to install or maintain.
- Our company has noticed that over our six years of use the performance has slowed dramatically.
- The newly revised user interface is plain and requires more mouse clicks. There is too much white space. Blinding on large monitors for us CAD users. Dark mode helps but has its own quirks.
- Imports that go wrong or do not complete can hang up imports for the entire company.
February 07, 2020
Area helps speed up the analysis
Arena is used by the Design team and NPI department so it can be deployed and used on the manufacturing site by a few members to consult information.
- Very good link between the BOM and supporting documents.
- Keep all information in only one database.
- Redundancies of where to access documents.
- Assign approvals to specific users.
January 21, 2020
Arena Solutions
I set up Arena so that we have a centralized area to store and control documents for quality documents, drawings, operation documents, and supplier information. It is currently being used across the whole organization (R&D, operations, quality, and supply chain). The business problem that it addresses is keeping documents updated and aligned. There is only 1 current document and approved document. Any other document is not valid unless uploaded and approved in Arena. Also, for supply chain, the item master is very useful in controlling Bill of Materials for each product when set up correctly. Data can easily be exported and reviewed.
- BOM control
- Controlling approved documents to make sure everyone uses the most current approved file.
- Quality control
- Data Export
- Takes a long time to set up.
- Must enter BOM in 1 item at a time.
- Don't have full control. Must use Arena support to control back end.
December 10, 2019
Stay ahead of your competition with Arena
Arena is currently in use at our organizations' product implementation team to facilitate change management and document control. It's a great tool for version control and is our primary reference tool for our production and service teams.
- Strong version control tools.
- Robust document control.
- Few, if any integration plug-ins.
- Inflexible reporting tools.
December 02, 2019
Arena PLM - clean and powerful tool
We currently use Arena across our entire organization. Everyone from our QA, Engineers, NPI, and hardware guy use it. We have all our parts, suppliers, files, products in Arena as well. We store our internal company documents as well as our Work Procedures in Arena so employees can grab any necessary information quickly and efficiently. It helps us track all of our parts and it means no more BOMS in Excel which is great. Tracking ECOs are another benefit of Arena as it empowers us to see a track record of everything.
- Tracking Changes is extremely easy and looking back at past changes and which items were affected is great.
- The overall basic UX of Arena is simple enough to grasp and a lot of the different views are conveniently within grasp.
- Storing all different kinds of file types is useful. From Software data, to powerpoints, to pdfs. Arena handles it all very well and being able to grab the data with one search is extremely effective.
- Arena Analytics provides a good foundation for reporting throughout the system
- Limiting users from viewing only Approved Suppliers is not an option unless you implement Access Policies. Since Access Policies is additive in nature we have to think backwards when implementing. This occurs with several other views that we want to block so to get around this we created a rule but then we don't enable it in order for us to block that view from being seen.
- Training Plans can be viewed by everyone even if they are not assigned to that training plan. This can be an issue because employees can view WIs that they are not assigned to. There should be a feature that we can use to limit users to only viewing training plans that they are assigned to.
- If Arena was able to tailor the Quality module so users can have sign off steps and steps with attributes combined that would be helpful.
November 22, 2019
ARENA SOLUTIONS - Product Lifecycle Management
Arena is our organization wide PLM solution. It allows us to manage product data with ease.
- Great tool for engineering change management.
- Insures security/integrity of all product data.
- Excellent implementation of revision control for product data.
- % progress bars for approval of an ECO.
November 22, 2019
Arena - Best for the price
Arena is mainly used in the engineering department to store all of our design files to share with our CMs.
- Easy sharing and compartmentalizing components and assemblies with CMs
- Building and releasing ECOs
- Tracking ECO process
- The UI is confusing in some places where there are multiple menus that seem to do the same thing but actually do not
- When releasing ECOs it is hard to understand what is "shared" with vendors without looking at each component
November 20, 2019
Vincent - fitbit - Arena Review
Arena is currently deployed across the entire organization for the purpose managing Fitbit's product data.
The product data it allows us to vault and change control are the following:
The product data it allows us to vault and change control are the following:
- Part Numbers/Items
- Item Attributes
- Suppliers / Supplier Items
- Item BOM
- Item Revs
- Item Lifecycles
- Change Orders / Deviations
- Change Requests
- It provides a solid PLM tool that is ready and easy to use, without much upfront cost and deployment effort.
- It provides ready to use licenses for outsourced Suppliers to navigate product data Fitbit has granted access to.
- Allows Administrators to quickly deploy new Item & Change types as well as implement new attributes, across the organization.
- Allows users to not only see the files associated with the item, but also any files attached to the supplier item being referenced
- More change control should be implemented to Supplier Items, like lifecycles and change controlled attributes at the supplier item level
- Better traceability and audit trails on any and all objects in Arena that can be easily seen through a history tab
- Better control on user defaulted settings, managed by the administrator.