Item: Arena PLM and QMS
Rating: 9
Author: Nicole Anderson

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We currently use it for all product documentation and the release of it to our contract manufacturing vendors. we use the request world as the collaboration and approval and then build to ECO as a notification. The request summary should be as big as the changes summary, the notes on the items and the participate don't copy over from the request when you build the change, and you should be able to have your from/to condition in this screen as well.

USERS: Engineering, Supply Chain, Manufacturing, Product Quality, Product Management, Marketing, Software/Firmware.

Pros and Cons

If your suppliers use Arena this is an easy way to communicate product documentation and changes .
You can customize to fit within your organization.
Very easy to train new and older employees how to use the system (Help Support is great!)

The request summary should be as big as the changes summary. The notes on the items and the participate don't copy over from the request when you build the change and they should.
You should be able to have your revision from to condition in the request screen as well.
Arena makes it hard to do clean-up projects, we need to be able to edit in bulk.
Example if I have a category cable and I want all my item names to have CABLE, in the item name. It's really hard to make a change like this in bulk unless I export out and import in, and then do a change to implement. And then if any working mods are out there, mistakes happen. I have worked with systems that allowed level of admins be able to make changes without this issue.
I would like the option to set a standard to have all item names, etc., to be all caps regardless of how it is entered. How can I make this happen without touching every freaking part and having to do a change?
Exchange needs help. The idea is great but, it hasn't worked for me without a glitch. if you are sending to multiple companies you can't hide them from each other without doing double the work.
Notification of any modified items for admins would be awesome, especially when you have 120 users with updating capabilities.
Multiple work spaces! We need to have one master and be able to pick and choose what items get put in what workspace(s).
Everyone complains about the amount of emails that they get from Arena. I know this is a hard one.
Sharing in Arena is still one of the pain points
My engineering team would like to see a engineering module created. I have put some thought into this but it would force me to do double the work.

Return on Investment

I really don't have this information. It is the only tool we use to communicate to our suppliers. I can only say before Arena we had to Export packages and email, FTP everything .

Key Differentiators

Product Features
Product Usability
Prior Experience with the Product

Arena Implementation

Yes implementation was easy and user friendly. One of the quickest I have ever seen. I would like the integration to other software(s) to be easier and not so costly, like how the adapter for SAP is 60,000.