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Good for a permanent solution
September 21, 2018

Good for a permanent solution

Joshua Payne | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Arena

Arena is used as our PLM system for development and release of our products. It is used by our engineering, product management, and quality departments to manage the product lifecycle and to document approvals for release. It also contains our technical documents and manuals for each revision. We use a custom solution to integrate Arena into our Netsuite ERP system.
  • Arena makes it easy to document the product development. Users can easily look up revision information and the system is user-friendly.
  • Submitting approvals is simple and email notifications are well implemented.
  • System comes with reports and can be customized to meet the user's needs.
  • Exporting from Arena is extremely complicated. Online help does not describe the process. Even with assistance from the Arena support, it is still difficult to export a list of all released BOM information. The format of the export is not configurable, there are no field delimiters in CSV, and the export requires modification as the items are listed in order, but do not have any reference to the parent in the child lines.
  • Support does not have any more tools than you have. Therefore, if you cannot do it using Arena's interface, it cannot be done. Support can only help to do what is allowed by the interface.
  • No way to delete anything. Ever. You cannot have support do this either, because they do not have any other tools than what you have.
  • I am not qualified to comment on the ROI. I know that it has worked well in an environment which is geographically split all over the globe.
  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Third-party Reviews
Price was the most important factor. Other solutions were reviewed and the company went with the least expensive solution that would meet the minimum requirements.
I was not involved with the initial implementation. However, the ERP implementation took several months and we had to hire a contractor to do it. The solution relied on exports from Arena and complex scripting within our Netsuite ERP system. It is unclear whether the long lead time was the fault of Arena or if it was a bad contractor. However, it was made plain AFTER the system was in place that there was no pre-built solution to handle the Arena to Netsuite connector.
My understanding is that we selected Arena over Omnify because of the price. I was not included in the purchase decision.
Arena would be very good for a company that develops one product line. If you develop several, you will need multiple instances. Our company sold off a product line and there is no way to remove history. So the previous company will ALWAYS have the history until the date of separation. The new company may take several weeks to get a copy of the data that it needs. If we did not split, Arena would work very well, but if there is a change of this type, Arena is not a good solution. Do not plan to get your data out of Arena. Support cannot access the database directly. Once you are there, you will always be there.