Arena, It's impressive, but will it grow into it's full potential?
October 05, 2018

Arena, It's impressive, but will it grow into it's full potential?

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Arena

Our company uses Arena as a change request and document control [tool]. We use it across our Engineering, Marketing, Operations, and Customer Service/Repairs departments.

The company is small enough that we use the Request process as a means to purpose changes and assign tasks in regard to the changes. We then use Changes to track tasks and their completion. Once these changes are complete our service and operations departments use Arena for up to date documentation.

Pros

  • Arena does a great job allow customization of records to meet the needs of our company
  • Arena is excellent at providing a clear flow and link between records.

Cons

  • I would like to see improvements made to reports. It's not always apparent how a report is built, and sometimes it's difficult to just get the raw data out that you want without piecing several reports together.
  • Developing and sharing searches isn't very intuitive, and the tools for crafting a search are often difficult to use.
  • I would like to see more tools involving assigning tasks that are related to moving a request through the change process. This way our team can collaborate through Arena instead of relying on other collaboration tools for assigning tasks related to going live with a change.
  • Our quality has improved greatly since we are able to keep track of the most relevant up-to-date documentation for our products.
  • Time to market has improved in so much that we do not have to spend as much time figuring out who has the most relevant version of our documentation.
  • Price
  • Product Features
At the time, Arena provided the most features with the best price. Since the time we've migrated to Arena, the feature set has only increased and improved.
Arena wasn't difficult for our team to implement, because we were starting a new cycle of product development and were able to start fresh with that new product launch. After that, we added parts and documentation as we had time or as changes to those parts were made.
Arena is well suited for organizing changes to products that have complex construction and multiple teams/departments involved in the many pieces that make those products.

Where it is lacking is that it doesn't scale down as easily. In our smaller NPI group we have team members who perform multiple roles, so they often see the Request and Change process as a hindrance to their workflow instead of an asset. I would love to see tools developed to help smaller teams be nimble with their changes while still maintaining a strong item record history.

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