Arena PLM

Arena PLM is a cloud native product lifecycle management system that ships with a quality management system alongside it, aimed at manufacturers who need engineering data and quality records in the same place. It is now sold as Arena by PTC following the acquisition, and the vendor states it is used by more than 1,500 companies worldwide.

Pairing PLM with QMS in one product is the central design decision and it is the reason the two module sets appear together rather than as separate purchases. In a regulated or safety critical manufacturing setting, an engineering change and the quality record that justifies it are the same event viewed from two directions, so keeping them in separate systems creates reconciliation work and audit risk. Arena keeps the bill of materials, the change order and the corrective action in one record set.

Item and bill of materials management sits at the centre, surrounded by engineering change management, document management, project management and supply chain capability. Supply Chain Intelligence adds real time electronic component data into the development workflow, which addresses the problem of designing a product around a part that is about to go end of life or become unobtainable.

The cloud native positioning is aimed squarely at teams migrating off older on premises systems, and the vendor markets specifically to organisations leaving Oracle Agile PLM as that product reaches end of life. A government edition runs on AWS GovCloud for customers with those requirements.