Arena is great and the organization is easy to work with
September 21, 2018
Arena is great and the organization is easy to work with
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Arena
We use Arena as our DHF and it is used by everyone in our organization. We use this to generate all new part numbers, all BOMS, all ECOs, and used for documents from training on QS to documentation to assemble our products and used by select vendors to build assemblies for us.
- Arena's access policies do a very good job of limiting what my users can see and do very effectively.
- Arena does a very good job of communicating changes that are going to occur in their software and when necessary online training for each new release.
- Arena's customer success personnel are very helpful and they get respond back to you in a very timely manner (at least our company's contact does).
- Although Arena has vendor access it is at times very time consuming to set up access to all the parts that they can see (large new assemblies in particular).
- When very small errors occur during a change (ones that wouldn't affect the content that was approved by the approval group) it would be nice to be able to have a super user that can correct these.
- All items and fields on an ECO are locked down once a change is routed for approval. It would be nice to have some fields on a change available to edit for users on the approval group and have the materials disposition open to update these for the approval group's area of interest. These changes would also need to be able to have the approval group a tiered concept vs just one whole one.
- Arena provides the DHF for our medical device products. If we didn't have Arena's PLM this would be very difficult to manage and would be costly to do offline.
- Arena's Training module has taken the spreadsheets and personal emails out of the hands of QA and has freed up the personnel to do the things they need to, to work on activities that help to improve and ship our product in a more timely fashion.
- Arena has an open API and can automatically create and or move the data into or out of the system to another system like Solidworks or an ERP (ones that also are on the cloud).
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Existing Relationship with the Vendor
- Third-party Reviews
Arena was already implemented in my organization when I joined it over 5 years ago but when we need to re-negotiate our contract with them I find them very easy to work with and my customer success manager does all she can to help me stay within the budget that I have been given.
I was not part of the implementation team as it was implemented before I joined the company. We are a start up so I would imagine there was not a lot of data to load only choices on how to use it and what that configuration would look like. I can't comment on any other aspects of this.
We were looking at using our ERP - IQMS to take the place of Arena but it didn't even come close to having the functionality and ease of use that Arena has. Omnify PLM came in and gave a demonstration and the management team choose Arena over them in a vote that wasn't even close.