To Arena...or Not
September 21, 2018

To Arena...or Not

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Arena

Arena is used for new product development. We use it to create SKUs, bills of material and other relevant product documentation. We use it to communicate product information to suppliers building product. We use arena to push product data into ERP system for planning, purchasing and supply chain.

Pros

  • Duplicates items easily - makes it easy to manually create part information

Cons

  • Arena allows duplicate items on a bill of materials without a warning. In some cases this is necessary depending on product type, but this is not best practice and definitely does not work well for those that do now need or utilize PCB assemblies in the product.
  • Arena allows duplicate suppliers on supplier tab without a warning. Bad practice and personally I can see no reason to have the same supplier or manufacturer listed more than one time.
  • If items needing changes are on an ECO, Arena does not capture the changes made unless ECO is manually manipulated to do so. Arena would be better functioning to allow changes to items, BOMs and such to be made both on an ECO and while in working revision prior to being added to the ECO.
  • Can sometimes lengthen time
I did not select Arena so I cannot speak to the reason behind the decision to purchase
Arena doesn't hold a candle to Agile or eMatrix. Maybe surpasses Baan.
Arena is limited for smaller businesses and is cumbersome to use and not easily integrated with ERP or other systems

Comments

  • Cynthia Herndon | TrustRadius Reviewer
    Thank you for posting your review and for your suggestions on how we can improve the Arena experience. I will discuss them with our Product team. I would love to chat with you how many of our customers successfully leverage process best practices to mitigate these concerns. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to me at cweston@arenasolutions.com if you would like more information or discussion about your Arena experience.

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