Item: Arena PLM and QMS
Rating: 5
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Being used across the whole organization. As an ERP software to manage file revisions and document things permanently. this information is considered validated and used throughout the company. Things must be in Arena in order to be purchased.

Pros and Cons

Allows for changes to be well documented.
Allows review from multiple departments so everyone is aware of changes.
Gives suppliers limited access to view information.

BOM import is tedious if you do not have a CSV file, and CSV files are sometimes annoying to make. Adding in items one by one is painfully slow.
New item creation is a very slow process. The web browser takes a long time to load.
Overall the application is not the fastest.

Key Differentiators

Product Features
Product Usability
Third-party Reviews

I am just the end-user, but I imagine that it was mostly purchased for the functionality it had and how it can manage revisions of everything from parts to documents to the software.

Alternatives Considered

IFS Applications

This software had way too many functions integrated into it, did not know how to use everything and it was very finicky. I did not enjoy it and find Arena to be much better.

Other Software Used

SOLIDWORKS, DraftSight, AutoCAD

Likelihood to Recommend

Arena is well suited for large quantities of items and also where changes can impact many different people or departments. Where parts are more one-off custom, the process can be a little long and time consuming if we only plan on using a part once. It is nice the application is web-based but this makes it quite slow most of the time.

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Alaine Portnoy
(Vendor Representative) commented 4 years ago
Thank you for your review. We appreciate the time you took to communicate the use of Arena within your organization. As you may know, our latest release has provided a significant update to the user interface, providing a clean and focused view that makes navigation easier and highlights critical activities, common actions, and next steps. We also recently have taken steps to address the cause of the performance issues you describe and you should be seeing improved application performance and response times. We are committed to improving user experience and will be providing additional updates in the future. Your Customer Success Coach, Cyndi Kuka, is here to help you get the most out of Arena. Please feel free to reach out to her regarding your Import and creating new items concerns. She can take a look at simplifying your process. If loading times are still an issue since the 73.0.7 release March 9th, please share more about your use case and she will look into it further. You can contact Cyndi at ckuka@arenasolutions.com any time.

Review of Arena from an engineer user perspective

Overall Satisfaction with Arena