Arena you're great, but I wish you were beer!
September 20, 2018
Arena you're great, but I wish you were beer!
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Arena
We use Arena to manage our product lifecycle, engineering development through end of life. We also manage our supply base in Arena. Our suppliers are integrated into our engineering change process from the first release. In a separate Arena workspace we manage our process documents and quality records. We utilize the quality module for nonconformances, corrective action and 8Ds. The controls in Arena made our ISO certification and recent surveillance audits go smoothly.
Because we have locations around to world using the Scribe tool has made communication much easier and eliminates the need to keep separate notes on product changes.
Reporting KPIs using Analytics reduced time spent extracting data, analyzing the data and writing reports from hours down to minutes.
Because we have locations around to world using the Scribe tool has made communication much easier and eliminates the need to keep separate notes on product changes.
Reporting KPIs using Analytics reduced time spent extracting data, analyzing the data and writing reports from hours down to minutes.
- Change management is very important. The ability to go back to any given change in a products history and see approvals, comments, rejections and Scribe notes. As well has BOM and drawing changes.
- Selectively giving access to suppliers and the ability to integrate them into change management.
- Having NCRs, CARs and 8Ds in one system where they can be linked directly to a product or document.
- Analytics reporting saves tons of time.
- Because our approvers are so different depending on the type of change we often do not use predefined routing. There is no way in Arena to limit who can change the approvers while a change is in process and there is no recorded history if someone does change the approvers.
- If an item is on a change and someone adds it to another change there is no warning. In the case of parent items they may not have any locked views so it is not obvious. You can easily have 2 ECOs in process with the same parent parts and not know it. You have to open each part on the items list to make sure there are not any other changes in process. This can lead to revision issues.
- This is a very hard question to answer. A PLM system in essential. I have implemented other tools at past companies. Errors in build documents can be catastrophic costing thousands or even millions of dollars. We implemented Arena very early as a start up.
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Product Reputation
Since Arena was implemented when we were still a start up cost was the most important factor. I would say scalability and features were next.
Arena was already in use when I started working here. Implementation was haphazard and I spent a lot of time cleaning it up. I don't think Arena support was involved.
I have had the opportunity to research other tools including Oracle and I am a former Agile Administrator. Arena is a great tool and easy to use. It is also the most cost effective.