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Arena viewed by a programmer
March 03, 2020

Arena viewed by a programmer

Simon Kelly | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Arena

Arena is used by manufacturing, engineering, maintenance, and quality insurance. The whole organization uses Arena. It helps centralize everything on our products from engineering, manufacturing, installation and spare parts. This is where we can retrieve all previous and current versions of all subcomponents and a higher-level drawing of our system.
  • Approval process.
  • Keeping track of everything.
  • Centralize all engineering documents and others.
  • Source control.
  • The interface is ugly. It looks like an 1990 web page.
  • The search engine is powerful but complex.
  • Program development feature. Programs versions and source control ex: git.
  • Being able to compare program versions in text format and highlight changes between previous and latest version release.
  • Design and product design change process.
  • Centralizing everything. Single point information access for the whole company. Especially when you have offices in 2 different countries.
  • Easy to consult BOM and schematics.
  • See who made and approved changes.
  • Product Features
Arena allowed Symbotic to centralize and standardize processes in the company. Engineering change request are now tracked with Arena. Being able to centralize the process, BOM, drawings and everything around our system changed the way we did things and we are now more efficient. It helped us ''productize'' our system. We are now able to sell automated cell with a catalog of options. It's been more simple for sales also to present to a customer what we can do and what they can sell without engineering development.
I was not involved in Arena implementation and can't extrapolate much on this topic. I am satisfied with the implementation team as I use Arena when I need to and rarely have issues.
None, It's the first time in my professional career I used this kind of software. We used to do custom automation projects and the need for such a platform was not there. Now that we are product-oriented, I can see why we went with Arena. I do not know any other competitors.
When we create our programs, I use Arena to go over the electrical schematic and mechanical drawings to create my IO list. Also, I can track which version is deployed at a specific customer and can adjust the program option according to the system variant. I use it to retrieve spare parts or components to maintain my test center up and ready. Less suitable the way we internally used it. I think it's less appropriate to hold operation procedures or maintenance procedures since searching for the specific sub-assembly can be complex for people that do not use it regularly.