Arena Review for a Startup company
October 14, 2019
Arena Review for a Startup company
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Arena
We use Arena for our mechanical, electrical departments to fill up BOMs and issue releases of our finished and released BOMs. Once the BOMs are released we use it as our primary source to order the BOMs as well.
- Associating files to certain parts
- Creating BOMs
- Assigning costs and quoting information, also the breakdown of costs for each part
- I like the tab views under BOMs, indented, flat, sourcing, purchasing which I often use to verify BOMs quickly.
- Under Costing, Edit Costs, once I click on quoted or rolled up I have to wait for the whole page to reload and then save changes. I am not sure why the whole page refresh is needed when I select these options.
- On the BOM tab, it would be nice to add or remove columns that I need to view which are relevant to my purposes.
- Auto-caps for naming would be a nice feature to enable. We use all caps for naming of our parts.
- Our market is based off NPD. We are a research team and always look to release new parts/BOMs more frequently. I feel arena is quick solution for this.
- As we use arena to order our parts, having costing associated with the BOMs is really helpful.
- Sourcing and vendor information is helpful.
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Third-party Reviews
We are a startup company, so we look at the price for licensing and the pricing played a crucial part in our decision to purchase Arena. Features are great for what we are doing and it is pretty quick. We looked around a lot and a third party review of Arena solution and cheaper price compared to the rest made our decision to purchase it.
It was pretty easy to deploy actually. Once a BOM is released, our purchasing manager quickly goes over the order and starts ordering parts for the assemblies.
A helpful feature though would be linking to vendor websites directly for purchasing. It would be easier and quicker for our purchasing team to place orders and quickly get in and out of BOMs.
A helpful feature though would be linking to vendor websites directly for purchasing. It would be easier and quicker for our purchasing team to place orders and quickly get in and out of BOMs.
I have used SOLIDWORKS PDM which stores and manages our check in and check outs for all our CAD files and drawings. We use Arena mainly for peer approvals for releasing BOMs and it helps us go through proper channels for finances to be approved. We are in the process of releasing many BOMs currently and hopefully looking forward to use the PLM side of arena to manage lifecycle on our products and create FRU items.