Helped us Improve our Change Control processes tremendously!
October 02, 2018
Helped us Improve our Change Control processes tremendously!
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Arena
Arena is being used primarily by our Product Development/Engineering organization for document and product design change control. We do have other read-only users throughout the organization (especially in Customer Service) that can access documents by clicking on Arena smart links that are copied into other applications, such as into our ERP system. We also have an API integration running between Arena and our ERP system NetSuite, to assist in automatically creating items and BOMs in NetSuite as they are released or revised from Arena.
- On many screens, there are multiple options to do other things, such as attach items just created to requests or changes. Each screen has a lot of buttons or commands that can be executed from there, rather than going back to another screen to start doing something else.
- The Bill of Material expand/collapse options are very useful, and the ability to see at a glance whether items have other pending changes is great. It helps us either consolidate several changes or process them in a specific order as may be appropriate.
- The request and change worlds are easy to use and configure. We have reduced our engineering change cycle time using these features.
- The Reporting module is seriously limited, and really only allows the reporting of rather basic information and from only one module at a time (for example, I have to pull data separately from the requests and then the changes module), then link resulting spreadsheets together to get overall cycle times for our engineering change control process.
- The Help system should be improved with more details. For example, a recent new feature of using multi-select attributes should be explained in the help section and examples described on how to import data to multi-select attributes.
- For PDX exports of changes, the FILTER option is still not available. This is very valuable to my company to allow us to filter out files/items contained in changes that are for internal consumption only, that we don't want to share with external parties.
- The API integration capability is under considerable scrutiny at my company. We deployed it to integrate with our ERP system and it has been a disappointment, to say the least. Not reliable. It takes too long before data transfer can be verified. We are currently considering other options.
- Our NPI time has been reduced significantly, as compared to doing manual engineering change orders. We are more able to keep the required documentation for new products on the same timeline with our actual process (ie, having revised/changed drawings available before the start of tooling or pilot).
- Document extraction and delivery to outside suppliers is also more productive/timely, and we are more assured of providing the current revisions.
- Product Features
- Product Usability
I was not involved in the selection decision. I was hired at company 2 months after it was implemented
Hard to say, it has been a number of years since I used Agile.