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Relatively New Arena User's Experience
October 05, 2018

Relatively New Arena User's Experience

Carl Brewer | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Arena

Arena is used mainly for corroboration between engineering and manufacturing organizations for the fabrication of items that we design.
  • Keeping a snapshot of a particular assembly of parts at a given moment in time is the main function that we rely on from Arena.
  • Arena helps us build a library of parts that can be searched and cataloged properly
  • Navigation is still a task that requires power-user level of understanding. I would love a simpler way to see a clearer picture of my products, perhaps even a top-down diagram for each product, and an easy way to find the top level of each.
  • We are still relatively new with using Arena in our business, so it's hard to quantify the impact.
  • Product Features
  • Product Reputation
  • Prior Experience with the Product
Implementation has been an ongoing process as we attempt to iron out the kinks and cover the more unique situations as they come up. Honestly, it hasn't been a great experience as it has been difficult to find features that should just be easy to use. An example is rolling a change up the assembly tree was not nearly as intuitive as with most other versioning software, so it took quite a bit more of a learning curve.
I'm not aware of similar products, but I do use simpler versioning products, Dropbox and SVN. They are vastly easier to use, but lack a lot of the features provided by Arena. It's not a fair comparison.
Arena is well suited to configuration management, where a detailed design needs to be preserved and communicated for reproduction. It represents a fair amount of overhead compared to a simpler system such as keeping versions in Dropbox or SVN, but presents enough advantages that I would consider it worth the extra effort. I like the ability to add processes to the work flow which is the final deal-maker for using Arena over a simpler solution.