Engineering Productivity at Scale

Read on for insights on why you may need to pivot your cost reduction approach, and what you can do to start making it happen quickly.

Despite being a universal platform used in the product development process, PLM has limited value for daily design team collaboration.

So what is a Design Engagement System (DES)? And how is it different from a PLM system? Read on to find out.

Whether you specifically want to be more agile in your product design process or you simply want to find better ways for your team to work, here’s what you need to know about using Jira for hardware development.

‍Greg Smyth, a former Group Manager at Tesla turned Career Pivot Coach at Career Pivot Accelerator, has significant experience managing supply chains for large-scale projects in the automotive and energy industries. On episode 1 of Peer Check, he sat down with host and CoLab CEO Adam Keating to talk about lessons learned along the way.

Going from initial brainstorms to finished design isn’t a straight line for engineering projects. The design cycle is inherently iterative, and more complexity in the design only leads to more complexity in the process. The more complex the design process, the more chances there are for the project timeline to get longer and longer. So when you’re responsible for hitting the mark on deadlines, schedules, and budgets—you want to take advantage of every single efficiency that will keep your design cycles moving along as fast as possible.

If your team is still (or once again) trying to phase out paper-based work, you might be trying to figure out how to help everyone get on board with a new digital process. This post offers suggestions for guiding your team through a process change, like going paperless or adopting a new digital tool, so you can get the buy-in you need to get everyone aligned on the same page.

CAD is just one piece of the puzzle when it comes to creating physical products. While you may already understand that the Bill of Materials (BOM) plays an important role in product development, it’s worth taking time to consider where this critical item fits within your existing processes. After all, even with flawless design data, if your BOM isn’t right—your product won’t be, either.

SharePoint has been around for a couple of decades now. As the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic drove higher usage for Microsoft Teams, SharePoint grew along with it. With over 200 million monthly active users, plenty of teams are using the platform to store and share files across different industries. But how well does SharePoint fit into engineering design processes?

One of the hardest battles in managing complex design projects is how to keep the admin from overshadowing the design work. This post highlights some key reasons to create processes that allow critical project information to get documented (without adding excessive administrative burden to your team).

Getting input on a design from multiple collaborators and stakeholders can be challenging on its own. Just to get it done, it takes a lot of admin work, organization, email tag, meeting requests, and all that other fun stuff. But “just getting it done” is only half the battle—the quality of the input matters, too.

While new tech solutions and modernized processes are changing the game for many teams, there are still plenty of face-palm-able moments that most engineers will be familiar with. So we’ve rounded up this list of highly-dreaded phrases that we hope will give you a little laugh and a little validation to know: you’re not alone.

The idea that any engineering team today can work with one single CAD system and one single CAD system only? It’s basically a pipe dream. Maybe internally, your team can get by using the same CAD software across the company—but as soon as you start involving people outside your organization, the need for effective multi-CAD collaboration is clear.

We asked Mark Morreale, our product manager and an experienced professional engineer, what tools he’d consider seriously useful for PTC Creo users. Here are Mark’s top 5 recommendations for tools you can use along with Creo.