Arena is a great, easy-to-use PLM system.
Updated November 13, 2020
Arena is a great, easy-to-use PLM system.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Arena
Being used as a PLM system, mostly for engineering and operations. It's setup for the entire organization but few outside of engineering or operations use the system. Arena helps organize the release and change of our products, which are comprised of over 700 parts.
- Mostly intuitive menu-driven structure.
- Ability to save a lot of information in a central location.
- Flexibility on how to organize information.
- Sometimes the menu-driven structure requires too many steps and layers, making data entry time consuming or hard to find.
- Customer service could be better. Last time we requested tech support, our sales representative seemed somewhat impatient and uncooperative. Afterwards, we have been avoiding customer support.
- Training workspace should have a large watermark on the screen or something else that makes it evident that you are not working in the official work space. On a few occasions, colleagues, including myself, accidentally signed into training work space without realizing it. I was afraid we lost months of important data.
- An internal,network backup. The cloud based system is usually nice, but we lose access to important i nformation during internet outages. We lose internet about 2 hours a week.
- Improved troubleshooting because we can archive support data or development history. Hard to quantify benefit.
- Improved time to market by allowing engineering to share information with operations . Hard to quantify benefits.
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Product Reputation
- Third-party Reviews
I didn’t select the software
Our support at Arena was generally good. Our latest interaction was less positive.
Using Arena
No, it currently does not directly support any regulatory efforts. However, part of the reason we selected Arena as a PLM solution, is because it helps us prepare for any possible future compliance with regulatory agencies, like 510K submissions to the FDA. We basically use Arena to electronically save our design history file and project plan, which is an important part of regulatory compliance.
Since its online, Arena has helped enabled many employees to work from home. ECO's can easily be reviewed and approved electronically and through online meetings. Also, documents are easily shared through Arena's online storage. This helps us remotely communicate with people different departments; documents can be shared between employees in engineering, software, purchasing, operations, and quality.
we have steadily increased the usage of Arena within our growing company. Initially, it was used solely for saving the latest documents and vendor specifications. Shortly afterwards, it evolved to controlling our ECO or change control process. Afterwards, we started using Arena PLM to initiate and track Change requests. Read only access became more widespread and is available to almost everyone within the company to share process sheets, company policies, and training documents.
Arena is a powerful PLM tool that has helped the company I work work more collaboratively and efficiently.
I've had no issues with Arena's customer success team. A couple of years ago, a colleague requested help and pointed out a potential software bug, and he said the service representative was rude and uncooperative. Although I don't question the sincerity of this individual, I have only had good customer interactions with the company..