Arena Solutions - a great fit for a startup
March 03, 2020
Arena Solutions - a great fit for a startup
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Arena
Arena is being used across the whole organization for Document Control, Training, Quality Systems, and Manufacturing. The biggest problems addressed are Training Compliance - no more manual tracking of training. The ability to have multiple reviewers look at documents simultaneously when approving documents is a big time saver. The BOM management function is particularly helpful to revision control BOM components without impacting the finished good revision level.
- Training management is excellent - an automated, compliant system that pushes assignments to users is a big time-saver for the quality group.
- BOM management is super simple and allows for revision level control on components to be made easy.
- Compliance in document management is a big win—no more non-compliant server storage for document access.
- In automatically assigning approves, Arena could improve in allowing for some level of secondary selection. Too many people get notified unnecessarily on changes.
- There's no way to complete training outside the system or check off training done in the past.
- There aren't a lot of "If, Then" functionality you can add in (i.e., There's no way to say if the answer to a question is yes, require another question.) Lots of training has to go into system use to make sure it's done right.
- Reduction in quality cost - we will require less headcount for document and training management as we grow.
- Cost of compliance goes down as there is a significant decrease in compliance risk.
- Document storage and printing costs decrease from a paper system.
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Vendor Reputation
- Third-party Reviews
Compliance and vendor reputation was most important to us. When implementing an eQMS, you don't want to go with a company that is an upstart that may be acquired by a bigger fish. We wanted to go with a company that has been around for a while and is not likely to have significant structural changes within the next five years.
Implementation took a while, but it was a good process. You are assigned a "solutions architect" who will train you on configuration and help with your configuration and document upload process. We had a great working relationship, but the weekly cadence of the meetings may not have been speedy enough for us and probably delayed our launch somewhat.
In the past, some employees had experience with Agile and ETQ. For a smaller company, the building of a system from the ground up was too large a scope for us to handle at this point.
Some of the other, more recently launched options like Greenlight Guru has a great idea behind them, but we decided to go with a company that had a longer track record and was less likely to be acquired.
Some of the other, more recently launched options like Greenlight Guru has a great idea behind them, but we decided to go with a company that had a longer track record and was less likely to be acquired.