Item: Arena PLM and QMS
Rating: 7
Author: Carl Brewer

Overall Satisfaction with Arena

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Arena is used mainly for corroboration between engineering and manufacturing organizations for the fabrication of items that we design.

Pros and Cons

Pros

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

Cons

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.

Return on Investment

We are still relatively new with using Arena in our business, so it's hard to quantify the impact.

Key Differentiators

Product Features
Product Reputation
Prior Experience with the Product

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.

Other Software Used

Dropbox Business, Apache Subversion

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Comments

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Scott Reedy
(Vendor Representative) commented 7 years ago
Thanks Carl for sharing your experience with Arena. We appreciate your pros and cons feedback and continue to look for ways to improve he customer experience. I will share your feedback with our product team.

Relatively New Arena User's Experience