Arena - a pretty good tool.
September 24, 2018

Arena - a pretty good tool.

Tish Rowley | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Arena

We use Arena to document our parts & processes, primarily in the engineering area. We are including more departments to encompass the design, validation and production functions, as well. We have recently implemented forms in the Quality module to track our design/validation processes. Historically, this has just been a parts & process repository for the engineering team.
  • We can now link our quality process results to parts. This helps when looking at revisions and releases.
  • Arena is flexible in allowing creation of items and naming conventions.
  • The quality module, while still a little clumsy, provides a good place for creation of forms and procedures.
  • Arena is not the most intuitive, especially where users are promoting a request - the option to "raise an issue" is not easily seen or discerned, causing users to simply comment when they really mean to raise an issue. This process is a little clumsy.
  • Adding a document to a signed-off quality process is either clumsy (need to re-validate or do proxy validation after re-opening the process), or sneaky, by going in and replacing the document associated with the file number. Sometimes, we just need to add a forgotten document.
  • I cannot address these issues. Arena has not been used extensively enough by the entire organization to measure this.
Not my decision. This tool was being used when I got here. But when we were evaluating Arena in my previous company, the nature of medical device manufacturing and the needs for regulatory compliance were not met by Arena. The new module may make a big difference for the med device companies evaluating Arena going forward.
I was not part of this experience. Arena has been in use at my current company for many years. The revision roll-out webinars, however, have been very useful, as are the training videos.
Again, I did not select Arena where I work, and we passed on it where I worked previously because it did not meet the requirements for regulatory compliance.
The new requirements module seems to be very much like the MasterControl card system, but it does add more functionality that is needed for a regulated environment. I'd need to actually use to to determine if it would fill in the "holes" which would have prevented it from being well-suited to a regulated industry where design controls, traceability and compliance to requirements are critical to production records.

Tracking of production lots does not seem to be easily done in the existing modules.