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Vincent - fitbit - Arena Review
Updated November 20, 2019

Vincent - fitbit - Arena Review

Vincent Fernando Juares | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Arena

Arena is currently deployed across the entire organization for the purpose managing Fitbit's product data.
The product data it allows us to vault and change control are the following:
  • Part Numbers/Items
  • Item Attributes
  • Suppliers / Supplier Items
  • Item BOM
  • Item Revs
  • Item Lifecycles
  • Change Orders / Deviations
  • Change Requests
  • It provides a solid PLM tool that is ready and easy to use, without much upfront cost and deployment effort.
  • It provides ready to use licenses for outsourced Suppliers to navigate product data Fitbit has granted access to.
  • Allows Administrators to quickly deploy new Item & Change types as well as implement new attributes, across the organization.
  • Allows users to not only see the files associated with the item, but also any files attached to the supplier item being referenced
  • More change control should be implemented to Supplier Items, like lifecycles and change controlled attributes at the supplier item level
  • Better traceability and audit trails on any and all objects in Arena that can be easily seen through a history tab
  • Better control on user defaulted settings, managed by the administrator.
  • I was not around during the ROI analysis, however, I can say for certain that Fitbit has benefited greatly from having deployed Arena during its time of tremendous growth.
  • Price
  • Product Features
  • Product Usability
  • Product Reputation
  • Positive Sales Experience with the Vendor
  • Third-party Reviews
Again, Arena looks to have been deployed back in 2011, while I've only been here since October of 2017. The answers above are purely speculative.
I wouldn't be able to say.
We were exploring upgrading to Oracle Agile PLM, but our plan was quickly shut down due to budget constraints.
Arena is perfect for deploying to a new start-up company or to a recently acquired company. It has room for improvement if deploying to a larger more mature organization that has more complex business processes and various data system integration requirements.

Using Arena

1500 - Marketing, Engineering, Sales, Operations, Supply Chain, Manufacturing Engineering, Trade Control Compliance, Quality Control, Procurement
3 - - Cross-collaboration and communication skills to effectively enforce Arena standards and rules.
- Leadership ability to implement configuration and business processes
- Minimal technical skills in making configuration updates.
  • BOM Changes
  • Revision Changes
  • Communicate Changes to Global Suppliers
  • Single Source of Truth for other data objects (not part numbers)
  • Sourcing Changes Workflows
  • Hiding certain attachments from Suppliers
  • Quality Tool
  • Training tracking tool
  • Ticket tracking tool
Needs integration capabilities, but its core features are solid.

Lessons for Success

Arena has provided our organization with a robust and easy to use PLM solution. It provides system administrators tools for quick configuration updates with low overhead. I have however, learned that Arena's simplicity also hinders its scaling capabilities and needs a major revamping of its architecture to provide modern integration capabilities with other systems. I will say this though, seems like the company has been redefining their product roadmap, and consequently have been putting great effort in making small but impactful changes to the product on regular scheduled updates.
Our organization required that our SKU part numbers only be transferred from our Arena PLM to SAP ERP, when the following criteria was true:
- SKU was in Rev A (In Production)
- SKU Category = netsuite

To accomplish this, our team leveraged the Arena APIs and obtained scheduled reports out of Arena when new SKU items met the criteria.
- The Change (ECO) redlining feature to see what spec, BOM, or Sourcing updates were made on an ECO, then being able to cycle through them is an awesome time saving feature.
- Being able to see manufacturing pn attachments, below the actual item attachments is also a blessing I haven't seen in other PLM tools.

Evaluating Arena and Competitors

Not much change needed. Our evaluation and selection process is pretty standardized and meticulous.