Arena PLM

Terrible customer and sales service. They oversold a number of licenses by far (misguiding and misinterpreting our needs). Their sales team provided a training session via zoom (3 calls 1.5 hour each) that in fact turned out to be a Quick Start program (they never communicated on the calls that it was onboarding program) that apparently charge XK USD - over 4 digit number per hour for a distant training call. During the call, we set up an account for testing purposes and never used it afterward since the software did not meet our needs and requirements. We never started using their software and requested to cancel the contract then. Now, they are chasing us to pay annual contract licenses as per originally quote and threatening with the court. Bad policies and totally inflexible.

Another problem is that they never provided the actual trial (our team never used it but they claimed they set up accounts, no confirmation was received on our side).

I was concerned about piracy in the cloud. That became a non-issue and realized we didn’t have to manage much when we’re on a browser and at a reasonable cost.

I can pull data directly and load it into the system and we’re on the run.

With Arena PLM, everyone signs off on engineering plans.

Some of the challenges we face are life cycle management challenges. Trying to prevent the production line from shutting down because we can’t get parts. IN the past, we’ve always had to wait for the contract manufacturer to contact us and let us know they were out of parts.

Being more proactive and using tools effectively with Arena PLM we were able to fix the problem.

It’s the capabilities that a small to medium sized company can take advantage of. Other platforms are larger in scale and require more overhead and more infrastructure where Arena can be implemented at low cost and low resources.

Arena has let us start small. We purchased arena and had 3 seats originally and now have 10 seats so it has grown with us and as we’ve grown we’ve added a number of suppliers so it’s a perfect platform for a startup environment that take a product from design to manufacture to revenue stage.