Arena - The (not so) Little PLM System that Could!
March 06, 2020
Arena - The (not so) Little PLM System that Could!
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Arena
Arena is used across our organization to support multiple business processes. On the engineering side, it is used to control engineering design and approval from the design stage through to production release, and houses the company's device master record (DMR). The company also uses Arena to capture the device history record (DHR) for each unit built in production. All quality and regulatory information and the design history file (DHF) is stored on Arena. All employees also do any required training through Arena since the system stores all of the company's process maps and training material.
Arena helped the company better organize and manage its engineering, quality and regulatory, manufacturing, project, and training processes.
Arena helped the company better organize and manage its engineering, quality and regulatory, manufacturing, project, and training processes.
- Implementation is straightforward and the Arena implementation experts are EXTREMELY helpful, efficient, and knowledgeable
- Arena has recently released a new UI design which is more modern and streamlined than the original design.
- The Quality World was easily manipulated so that the company could use it for manufacturing and tracing router, build records, etc. (a use case we did not originally have for Arena, but ended up working quite well).
- The Requirements World design is a good start, but extracting data into usable reports still needs a little work.
- The integration with Good Data to help with pulling KPIs and metrics is also good, but is not intuitive (in terms of how to use it and set up your own reports).
- The user type breakdown can be a bit limiting. All of the company's users who only have the training option can only access documents available to them on their training plan, meaning they cannot directly access other controlled documents on the system. It would be better if the user types were just two types, full users and read only users (instead of full, approver only, read only, training only etc.).
- Decreased the company's time to market for release of its second generation flagship product.
- Decreased the turn around on non-conformance reports (NCRs), supplier corrective action reports (SCARs), and corrective and preventative actions (CAPAs).
- Better organized the company's process maps, DHF, and other regulatory related information so that major audits are completed faster and with fewer findings.
- Price
- Product Features
The price point was the most important factor in the company's decision to purchase Arena since after doing a thorough review, it determined that it had the same features and functionality that all other major PLM systems reviewed had. The pricing was flexible and implementation costs were significantly cheaper (and faster!) than other systems.
Arena is great overall, and everyday use of the system and support from the Arena team is fantastic, but the implementation experience by far has been the best experience the company has had with the system. Implementation was easier than expected and very quick. You work directly with your implemenation expert on prepping the required migration files, and in doing so you learn a lot about the system and become a more effective administrator. Arena was also very easy to deploy, and users at the company picked up on how to use it very quickly.
Arena has all the functionality the company needs (all the PLM systems reviewed had the same basic functionality) and was a better price. It also offers great support after implementation at no additional cost. It was also great to work directly with Arena, rather than through a third party implementation team. Arena also included administrator and user training at their head offices in the purchase price of the system, and it was open to negotiating the cost of additional user licenses.