Rockwell Automation Arena Basic Edition Users Guide - Manual (Page 7)

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Welcome to Arena Basic Edition
What is Arena Basic Edition?
Arena Basic Edition software lets you bring the power of modeling and simulation to
business process improvement. It is designed primarily for newcomers to simulation and
serves as an introductory product and foundation to the rest of the Arena product family.
Typically, any process that can be described by means of a flowchart can be simulated
with Arena Basic Edition.
Arena Basic Edition is most effective when analyzing business, service, or simple (non-
material-handling intensive) manufacturing processes or flows.
Typical scenarios include:
„
Documenting, visualizing, and demonstrating the dynamics of a process with
animation
„
Predicting system performance based on key metrics such as costs, throughput, cycle
times, and utilizations
„
Identifying process bottlenecks such as queue build ups and over-utilization of
resources
„
Planning staff, equipment, or material requirements
In addition to the Arena Basic Edition, Rockwell Automation offers a full suite of prod-
ucts to provide enterprise-wide simulation, optimization, and 3D model animation.
Intended audience
The Arena Basic Edition is designed for business consultants, business analysts, and
engineers. It can be widely deployed as a desktop tool and can serve as a natural extension
to those who use various flowcharting packages such as Visio
® to document business
processes.
We assume that you are familiar with the basic concepts and terms used in these types of
systems. You are interested in improving business or manufacturing productivity and are
responsible for evaluating and predicting the impact of proposed strategic and tactical
changes to help improve performance. A familiarity with computers and the Microsoft
®
Windows ® operating system is assumed. A familiarity with the concepts and terms used
in simulation is also helpful.