Arena is an OK low-ish cost, simple out-of-the-box PLM solution but very limited in its abilities
September 20, 2018
Arena is an OK low-ish cost, simple out-of-the-box PLM solution but very limited in its abilities
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Arena
Arena is being used as our primary PLM system. It is used heavily in mechanical and electrical engineering as well as operations. Arena also holds some general requirements and compliance docs although it is not our primary document control system for non-engineering related documents like legal, on-boarding, other departments, company standards, etc.
- For the most part - it works and is easy to use. It captures data mostly as it should and is way better than trying to manage revisions and BOMs via Excel, sheets, or other piece-wise systems not intended for that.
- It also handles BOM red-lines pretty well.
- Floating BOMs is stupid. If anything this should be an option.
- AVLs don't work well. AVLs float up which is ridiculous. There's no AVL red-line.
- No future changes. You can't lock and pend one set of changes and begin working on another set of future changes in the same category (specs, files, etc.)
- Very very limited rev options. There is no logic to revisioning - you can't say have Minor and Major rev, one is previous rev +1 or +letter, one is +0.1 or +1 digit after letter. You have to manually input revs if you do anything other than whole revs and even then it doesn't work well.
- Very poor CAD integration.
- Literal garbage importing/exporting tools. You cannot bulk change suppliers AVLs. Uploading many files to be attached to Items is absolute trash. Uploads fail half the time or have unintended consequences which you CANNOT easily recover from.
- Extremely limited ability to do things in bulk - like delete 100 Items, or roll back specs on 100 Items, or bulk change dozens of things categories etc.
- No ability to roll back to previous rev. You should be able to set roll back to any previous rev, not just last released rev.
- Discussion ability very limited. Scribe + requests are functionally limited and frustrating to use. They pale in comparison to competitor tools like Jira. Arena should have a plug in or forum (other than Scribe) where discussion can happen and files and screens can easily be attached.
- Searching is so bad. How do you not have an 'Or' function!? Why can't I upload a search? I end up having to upload to a fake BOM if I ever want to search a list of things. Why is this not built in?
- Interface is inconsistent and not great. Things like 'add to change', 'keep', 'show only', 'add to BOM' etc. Will be available on some lists and in some worlds but not on others. They should all be available at all times regardless of weather I am look for Supplier Item Sources or BOMs or Change lists or whatever
- Change reports are pretty terrible. I should easily be able to output a static PDF for safe keeping or other parts of the organization.
- Reports world is non-functional and useless.
- No easy way to output a list of current supplier requirements and their status - and def no way update them
- Cannot see where used of working rev, cannot see where used in search list.
- Cannot customize user settings like search drop downs - ex: always search Items, Any by default
- No ability to add public links to documents - we may want released files to have a public link with security key or something so people in partner organizations can download without going through their 1 or 2 users or us having to buy dozens and dozens of partner licenses.
- Overall, it brought our ECO time down significantly with greater clarity and traceability (most of the time).
- We managed to get other departments without strong revision control to interact and take part of the change process and revisioned BOMs more effectively.
- It gave us a clear platform to communicate revision and go to for getting accurate revisions (internally and externally)
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Positive Sales Experience with the Vendor
- Third-party Reviews
Price (always) and can it do what we need - which to be fair for the most part it does, just not well.
Implementation specialist helped determine the many settings and set-up we would need (categories, routings, change categories, attributes, etc.) and helped us transfer many things from our existing CAD vaults and repositories and upload them to Arena.
Implementation went about 80-90% as well as could be. Biggest challenges were faced in really understanding supplier Items, and a poor job was done in explaining and planning out our electrical component database - however, additional services were provided to help and correct these oversights.
Implementation went about 80-90% as well as could be. Biggest challenges were faced in really understanding supplier Items, and a poor job was done in explaining and planning out our electrical component database - however, additional services were provided to help and correct these oversights.
Aras, SAP, and Oracle are all alternatives however implementation, cost, and scale are prohibitive.
PropelPLM is killing Arena right now and generally on the same price range.
Omnify Empower also looks to be a promising alternative.
PropelPLM is killing Arena right now and generally on the same price range.
Omnify Empower also looks to be a promising alternative.