PTC Arena Tops ABI Research’s 2024 QMS Software Competitive Assessment

Quality management system (QMS) software is a strategic asset that empowers organizations to deliver high-quality products, meet compliance requirements, and drive continuous improvement. When evaluating QMS solutions, it’s important to understand what sets leading solutions apart. ABI Research shares these insights in their 2024 QMS Software Competitive Assessment. 

ABI Research’s detailed study reviewed and compared 19 QMS providers to offer an unbiased assessment and ranking. In their evaluation, PTC Arena was ranked as a clear leader. Arena QMS notably earned high scores in the Innovation and Implementation categories, helping PTC secure a top vendor score and matrix placement over competitors like Greenlight Guru, Qualio, Dot Control, and MasterControl. 

These results are not surprising, as Arena supports an ever-growing installed base and consistently earns five-star ratings from customer review sites including TrustRadius and G2. Amid today’s turbulent and highly regulated environment, companies trust Arena to help them enhance efficiencies and gain a competitive advantage.

Why do so many companies choose Arena QMS?

When you compare different QMS solutions, it’s important to consider factors like implementation, functionality, ease-of-use, maintenance, customer support, and cost. Is the system easy to deploy? Does it easily scale as your business needs evolve? Will it help you reach your product development, compliance, and financial goals? Upon closer evaluation of these critical aspects, you’ll discover that Arena outperforms the competition.

5 REASONS WHY ARENA QMS SURPASSES THE COMPETITION

Here are five key factors that support ABI Research’s findings and make Arena QMS the preferred choice:

1. Modern, Cloud-Native Platform

Unlike traditional cloud-enabled and on-premises QMS solutions, Arena’s cloud-native platform eliminates costly IT resources and upfront expenses for hardware, networks, and other infrastructure. The no-code system is highly configurable and easy to deploy and maintain. Additionally, it readily scales to meet your evolving needs.

“The solution comes with a wide range of pre-configured dashboards and templates to support rapid value creation for customers and can effectively scale with manufacturers’ growth.”
-ABI Research 2024 QMS Software Competitive Assessment Report

Customers do not have to deal with frequent downtimes for maintenance and updates. Instead, regular QMS software enhancements are seamlessly pushed to users without any disruption. By providing continual access to new software capabilities, organizations can reap the full benefits of Arena while maximizing their return on investment.

2. Product-Centric Approach to Quality Management

Arena connects quality and change processes directly to the product bill of materials (BOM), providing cross-functional teams greater visibility into issues that impact the product. In turn, they can come to a quick resolution and drive closed-loop CAPA processes.

This product-centric approach to quality management provides organizations greater control and traceability throughout the entire product lifecycle to ensure regulatory compliance.

3. Advanced QMS and Compliance Capabilities

• Supply chain collaboration

  Companies rely on contract manufacturers (CMs), component suppliers, and other partners to help design and build their products. Without access to a single source of truth, these experts cannot ensure that compliant parts get sourced, and the right product gets built on schedule.

  Arena facilitates the efficient exchange of information between internal teams and external supply chain partners by providing collaborative tools like dashboard notifications, formal ECO routings, informal chat apps, and a 3D CAD viewer.

  Leveraging Arena’s role-based access controls, organizations can ensure that their external partners only see information that is pertinent to their specific job.

• Watermarking
  Arena safeguards revisions and enhances document integrity by automatically watermarking each record with unique identifiers like revision, effectivity date, and lifecycle status. Teams can be confident that they are using the right document revision for product assembly, testing, and inspection. What’s more, they reduce audit risks.
• Process automation
  Using Arena Automations, teams can reduce their workload by automating repetitive tasks that are tied to engineering change orders (ECOs) and quality processes. For instance, users can easily configure Arena to automatically generate a corrective action request once a nonconformance material request has been approved. This capability significantly reduces process cycle times and eliminates manual errors.
• Training management
  Arena streamlines training compliance for FDA, ISO, SOC, OSHA, and other standards by linking employee training plans and documents directly to the product record. It automates training assignments and easily tracks employee progress. Ultimately, organizations benefit from reduced administrative overhead and simplified audits.
• Document control
  Arena automatically applies change processes and revision controls to standard operating procedures (SOPs), training records, and other QMS documentation to ensure that information is always accurate and up to date. A complete history of product changes is maintained in Arena for a traceable audit trail.
• Business intelligence
  Arena Analytics converts product and quality data into meaningful insights that organizations can use to optimize their processes and drive continuous improvement. Out-of-the-box dashboards focus on key operational areas, enabling cross-functional teams to quickly pinpoint issues and take immediate action.
• Software validation
  Arena Validate includes a comprehensive set of validation documentation (e.g., requirements, impact analysis, protocols, templates, reports) and domain experts to help medical device companies speed FDA 21 CFR Part 820 and Part 11 compliance. This significantly reduces the financial and administrative burden of performing validations in-house.

4. Pre-Built Enterprise Integrations

To further streamline quality processes and accelerate new product development, Arena QMS easily integrates with upstream and downstream enterprise systems like computer-aided design (CAD), enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and manufacturing execution systems (MES). No-code application programming interfaces (APIs) and pre-built apps make it easy to connect Arena with other systems.

“Leveraging Arena’s integration architecture, companies can access Arena’s RESTful API and import/export/event engines. This enables Arena to embed itself even more firmly into manufacturers’ existing ecosystems.”

-ABI Research 2024 QMS Software Competitive Assessment Report

5. Industry-Leading Customer Support

Arena’s global team of solution consultants and customer success coaches possesses 200+ years of combined PLM and QMS experience. As former Arena customers they understand the challenges that companies face when bringing new products to market. The Arena support team is well-versed on the various industry regulations that directly impact product development and offers valuable insights on how Arena QMS can help.

Throughout the entire journey—from customers’ initial implementation to their full adoption of Arena—the support team offers continued guidance through extensive training programs, technical sessions, best practices, and more.

ABI RESEARCH QMS SOFTWARE REPORT: THE RESULTS SPEAK VOLUMES

Interested in reviewing the detailed results from ABI Research’s QMS software evaluation? Click here to download the report.

To see Arena QMS in action, schedule a demo.