Arena PLM + QMS

Arena, a PTC business

Reviews from AWS customer

0 AWS reviews
  • 5 star
    0
  • 4 star
    0
  • 3 star
    0
  • 2 star
    0
  • 1 star
    0

External reviews

424 reviews
from

External reviews are not included in the AWS star rating for the product.


    Christopher N.

Sr. Document Control

  • July 17, 2018
  • Review provided by G2

What do you like best about the product?
User friendly and the apps looks great.
What do you dislike about the product?
Nothing at the moment, I love the system and have no problem using it
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Technical support are great
Recommendations to others considering the product:
It a very good tool for Products Lifecycles Management


    Information Services

Arena all the way - great software for PLM

  • April 12, 2018
  • Review provided by G2

What do you like best about the product?
Everything is on the cloud.
It is easy to use, and there are more than one way to do something.
It has outward access to vendors.
It makes the ECO process almost automated.
What do you dislike about the product?
1) Sometimes, if you don't have good internet speed, this software can be annoying to use.
2) It is not as intuitive for a newbie - various levels of intervening that take some time to understand - i.e. it is not plug and play
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Streamlining the manufacturing process
Easy hand over from engineering to manufacturing
Recommendations to others considering the product:
User intuitiveness is needed.
User support needs to improve significantly.


    Medical Devices

Onboarding at Arena

  • March 08, 2018
  • Review provided by G2

What do you like best about the product?
Platform flexibility, resources, trust in product.
What do you dislike about the product?
UI is really tired. Hard to get up and running.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
QMS compliance for 13485 design holder and PLM traceability.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Easy to engage. Management is really attempting to monetize the product right now, which increases the financial barriers for acquisition. Especially as a startup.


    Penny D.

Arena is a perfect one stop shop solution for start up to medium size medical device companies.

  • March 02, 2018
  • Review provided by G2

What do you like best about the product?
First and foremost, I love Arena’s cloud base platform, which reduces cost by eliminating hardware and extra resources. It is easy to learn, easy to use and easy on the eyes - very GUI oriented. What you see is what you get - Arena's worlds make it extremely easy for a user to go from Item to Supplier to Quality process to Training.
What do you dislike about the product?
Arena could improve on the Quality templates. It would help if we could move fields around in a template, like we would be able to in Adobe forms or Word.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Working at start-up companies taught me to be creative with my time and resources because we tend to wear many different hats as we create and shape the company's processes and standard operating procedures. Arena has given us the ability to be extremely efficient with our time and the lack of resources. The biggest benefit is the fact that wherever I go, as long as I have my surface or my smart phone, I can be 'in the office' working on ECOs, or creating new templates, following up on implementation actions, uploading files, creating items or creating BOMs... and, wherever my approvers are, if needed, they can approve on the fly as long as there is internet connection and their smart phone or laptop.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
The most cost friendly PLM/QMS solution in the market. Arena gives you more bang for the buck!!!


    Medical Devices

Simple, straightforward PLM/eQMS system

  • February 26, 2018
  • Review provided by G2

What do you like best about the product?
Arena is a very simple PLM system with eQMS hooks. It mostly works one way out of the box with very limited customization required. Importing and exporting of data is very straightforward. Engineers are familiar with it.
What do you dislike about the product?
Part of Arena's simplicity is driven from its rather limited ability to be customized. That's not inherently a bad thing, but there are a few flows that could stand to be a bit more customizeable.

The off-the-shelf connectors get so, so close to offering something totally workable out of the box, but managed to miss the mark in some small way that required some customization.

For example: the SolidWorks connector doesn't pull the solidworks BOM automatically, despite sales literature showing that was indeed a feature. We developed our own quick script to do so.

Similar challenges were had with the integration to ERP: estimated costing, approved vendors, and some item metadata one would assume would be transferred to ERP were not, requiring some scripting on our end or incurring additional integration costs.

Still, it's a lot closer to being off-the-shelf than pretty much everything else out there we've used.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Dramatic reduction in effort to release a part
QMS behavior that links to parts
Connectivity with ERP
Better value chain
Recommendations to others considering the product:
The usual recommendations of figure out flows, try early and often to find annoying and goofy behavior


    Jim G.

Clean, powerful PLM which hits a sweet spot for early implementation

  • February 24, 2018
  • Review provided by G2

What do you like best about the product?
Intuitive environment and UI, relatively easy training for new users, simple supplier access
What do you dislike about the product?
Many mass import/export or environment reconfiguration operations exist outside of Arena entirely and are performed in offline excel.
Some supplier visibility and approver routing operations are limited and complicated.

Supplier item changes versus item changes and relationships can sometimes be unpredictable.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Design and documentation revision tracking, clear supplier communication, BOM tracking.
We've realized efficiency benefits in having a centralized revision controlled BOM for numerous products and test fixtures, while improving supplier communication. Also serves as a high confidence design file storage location.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Start early.


    Dennis K.

Rigid But Powerful

  • February 23, 2018
  • Review provided by G2

What do you like best about the product?
Arena's ability to track and record item data, provide access to suppliers, and release changes in a structured manor are its strengths. Items in Arena are separated between internal and external [supplier] items and provides a platform to set up complex relationships between the two sets - this along with the ability to control files/attributes for each item type separately creates a powerful way to control procurement and build to order specifications. Setting up partner access is quick and access parameters are straight forward. The change record features are sufficient and if processes can support supplier feedback in Arena, tracking implementation discussions and status of change records are available. The floor to implement Arena PLM is very low so long as the standard workflows align with company processes. The nature of Arena being a cloud based application makes accessibility its greatest feature. Item data is available anywhere in the world and complex supply chains are unified on one unified platform.
What do you dislike about the product?
Process workflows and power user tools are somewhat rigid. Complex revision policies, proper product development tracking, and mass item update tools could all use improvement. Item revision policies force the latest revision to be the effective revision universally - in this model there is no control over the effectivity of incremental updates to BOM items. There are ways to get around this issue, but it leads to unnecessary complexity which is something a small business can't afford. Other PLM products offer linked/mirrored developmental and production workspaces, Arena does not have this feature. There is no straight forward way to track the incremental development stages for items that have already been released to a production lifecycle phase. For a small business in a constant state of growth and change - mass updates of item attributes is unfortunately a common place thing. Arena is constantly improving, but mass changes are largely still an incredibly manual process.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Arena provides a baseline and straight forward source of record. Despite some shortcomings that can often lead to confusion, processes can be created around the Arena platform that align worldwide suppliers together to build complex products.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
For a platform with such a easy set up, Arena is quite powerful. To get the most out of the platform, however, it would need someone familiar with the its limitations to properly set up the categories and item attribute fields to get the most out Arena from the start.


    Michael H.

Good but not Great!

  • February 23, 2018
  • Review provided by G2

What do you like best about the product?
The BOM management, layout, and structure are very clean. The only thing I don't like is that you cannot have design version and a production version live at the same time. This causes issues for the we perform engineering studies.
What do you dislike about the product?
The Quality World templates are too wide open for editing. The reporting tool is not very useful. There needs to be a way to duplicate quality processes and changes like there is for items. A lot of our quality processes repeat themselves over time and it was be a very useful tool.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
BOM management and change control. Huge savings in time for our previous paper based system.
Recommendations to others considering the product:
Great System.. I don't have any knowledge of the price


    Medical Devices

Best Option for small to medium size company

  • February 22, 2018
  • Review provided by G2

What do you like best about the product?
Arena is very easy to setup and best cloud option out there for small to medium size company. I also like the validation services that'r provided (with extra cost) but makes it easier for medical device companies. It's configurable somewhat but not always. It has helped make our Document Management and BOM control process very easy.
What do you dislike about the product?
Arena offers all kinds of reports although not very intuitive reports are available and it's pretty painful process to extract exact data. Weak Training Module and reporting functionality. It's almost of no use at this point as everything has to be done manually in Training from a Training Manager's perspectives. It requires you to create your own internal work instructions for your users.
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
BOM Control, Electronic Document approvals, Electronic DHF using Project functionality
Recommendations to others considering the product:
It's a great PLM system for starters and small size companies. It's not THE solution for your QMS though. It still needs lots of more enhancement features to make it a great product for Medical Device companies. Do you own research on what you will be mainly using it for. It's definitely great for BOM Control just not what we would ideally want for Document Control, Training and Quality functionalities.


    Media Production

Sr. Document Control

  • February 21, 2018
  • Review provided by G2

What do you like best about the product?
Arena PLM System is user friendly, very easy to use and very straight forward. I've been using this system for the last 15 years and it been wonderful, I'm a very heavy user on a daily basic and Arena seems to really help make my job so much easier to manage all the BOM's/ECO/Items and so on. I would highly recommend Arena to all new start up company, easy to use and very affordable.
What do you dislike about the product?
Just like any other PLM systems, there are always room to improve over time and Arena seems to have lots of new released and new feature that they do add to their new released it
What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?
Manage a lots of changes that Engineer make on a daily basic it's very hard to keep track of but with Arena system it's very automated and it does keep track of all history and traceable of all changes.