Arena gets the job done with a nice, new UI

Arena is being used at our engineering and manufacturing company as our document control system. We use it to process changes to engineering drawings, manufacturing instructions, etc. It is used across the engineering, manufacturing, and supply chain departments. It provides a central source of truth and space for agreement for everyone in our international offices and our contract manufacturers.

I was not part of the Arena implementation team, but Arena took a few months and a lot of tedious work to implement. Previously, document numbers were tracked in a Microsoft Access database. All of that information had to migrate to Arena over a period of time, which made it difficult to create new numbers. There were multiple training sessions held, but most people learned how to use it by navigating through it themselves. Our implementation team did a great job.

Arena is our main documentation repository for product related documents. All of our regulatory processes are maintained separately, but that is mostly due to my company being a small startup trying to figure out what compliance paths we should take. Arena definitely would have that capability if we wanted to use it that way. It can handle many different types of documents and you can make whatever categories that make sense for your company so that they are easy to search for. Arena also has a "referenced items" feature, where you can link different documents to each other if they are related, which would greatly help with collecting documents for compliance audits.

Luckily, most of our business processes were designed for "remote work" since we have an international presence and we regularly collaborate on product or process changes through our online systems. We did not miss a beat when WFH started when it came to implementing our engineering changes or updating documents, both of which can easily be done from home.

We also use Arena's Deviations feature to implement temporary instructions for our factory. Since our factory shut down, we had to make accommodations to renew those deviations once the factory reopened.

Arena was initially used for Engineering and Manufacturing change orders and our drawing and document repository. Since then, we have expanded it to use Deviations to track temporary changes to the manufacturing processes in the factory, started integrating it with our ERP software, and expanded the scope of existing ECO and MCO processes. The expansion worked pretty seamlessly for the Deviations, we were using a similar process before and had to translate the form into an Arena form. The ECO and MCO processes were just expanding the amount of input required from the change owner, so that was a straightforward task as well. The ERP integration has been a struggle. Since we are a startup spread across two countries (and soon to be a third), combining supply chain information and processes is not easy. There are many players that are involved in different capacities that make that integration a complicated task.

Arena will help you streamline complicated processes and bring order to your company's PLM.

I have not had to interact with Arena's customer success team.