AGI’s Permanent Handling division designs and manufactures chain conveyors, belt conveyors, bucket elevators, and screw conveyors for grain, feed, food, and fertilizer customers around the world. The products may look simple from the outside, but in practice they are complex engineered systems with subtle features and regional specifications that differ by market.

JaMall Wilson, Senior Global Design Manager for AGI’s Permanent Handling division, leads a cross-regional engineering team with engineers in Chicago, the Midwest US, and India. His team is responsible for adapting products and technologies designed in one region and localizing it for manufacture in another.

“It’s not just a copy-paste,” Wilson explains. “It’s more akin to new product development. You’re localizing the product, filling gaps, making it specific to that market.”

The challenge is not engineering complexity alone. Rather, it involves coordination across time zones, different CAD platforms, and storage systems that were never designed to work together. For any particular program, the Italy team might package files in their PDM and send links to the US team, who receives them in SharePoint. Meanwhile, the India team pulls the files onto a remote server to make their updates. Even before the first design review is called, a project might have several competing sources of truth.

From region to region, design feedback traveled via email, PowerPoint screenshots, and Microsoft Paint markups. Daily meetings were common — 6:00 a.m. in Chicago, 4:30 p.m. in India — and most of the agenda was spent deciphering what each team’s annotations actually meant, not making engineering decisions.

“Meeting daily is tough,” Wilson says. “You’re either getting up extremely early or staying up extremely late. And at the end of the day, it’s inconvenient for everybody.”

The teams were doing their best with tools built for a different era, but the disparate workflows came at a cost. Often, that cost was measured in revision cycles, delayed decisions, and engineering time spent on administration instead of engineering.

Wilson discovered CoLab the way transformative tools are often found: through a colleague’s recommendation. Before even finishing a short product video, he was on the phone with the CoLab team.

“Why is this not already a thing?” Wilson recalls thinking. “Why are these other big companies not doing this? It feels too obvious.”

AGI started their first CoLab pilot in the middle of a tech transfer of six pieces of equipment between Italy and India. The project was a month underway and the process was already showing its cracks. The pilot mandate was both simple and transformative: to leverage the markup tools in CoLab and establish one source of truth for design review.

“We activated the tool and immediately said, ‘No more Teams chats, no more email,’” Wilson says. “Let's put the information in the tool. Let’s communicate in the tool.”

After the first pilot delivered results, AGI worked with the CoLab team to build a repeatable framework for broader adoption. They identified three goals: accelerate time to market, increase design traceability and accountability, and reduce the cost of poor quality. They assembled a cross-functional team spanning engineering, manufacturing, and sales to select new product development and tech transfer projects as the primary use cases.

CoLab integrates with AGI’s SolidWorks and Jira workflows, which gives the AGI team a connected environment for design review, feedback tracking, and time logging across geographies. Non-CAD users, many of them manufacturing engineers and sales team members, could still participate in reviews directly in their web browser without needing access to CAD tools themselves.

Since adopting CoLab, AGI’s engineering teams have seen measurable improvements across their design review workflow, including:

• Technology transfer timelines reduced by three months. For AGI, time-to-market is directly tied to revenue recognition. For example, completing a program in September rather than November means that forecasted revenue lands in the same quarter, not the next one.
  
• 63% reduction in design review cycle times, with individual review cycles dropping from six or more revisions down to one or two per program.
  
• 100x increase in captured design feedback. AGI’s product launch on one program generated nearly 2,500 pieces of feedback over 12 months. Better feedback from more stakeholders means design decisions are made with the full picture, catching issues before they reach manufacturing.
  
• 8x increase in model review capacity. Before CoLab, a single model review took as many as 20 work hours over two months. Now, the team can complete eight separate design reviews in that same amount of time. For Wilson personally, a project estimated at 120 hours took only 40 to complete.
  
• 40% reduction in estimated engineering hours on an NPD program, which was delivered a full quarter ahead of its original target.
  
• Daily cross-regional meetings reduced to weekly. Beyond the rescued time, meetings became much more productive, with less time interpreting annotations and more discussion about engineering decisions.

AGI builds the infrastructure that keeps the global food supply moving. The faster their engineers can take a proven product and put it to work in a new market, the sooner the farmers, processors, and communities who depend on that infrastructure have what they need. 

For Wilson, the change in his team’s workflow was striking. “We went from talking about ‘What do these scribbles mean?’ to a weekly meeting to talk about the actual engineering,” Wilson says. “Can we do this? What if this feature looked this way? Can we do this in manufacturing? It was incredible.”

For the entire AGI team, the next step is straightforward: make CoLab as fundamental to its engineering workflow as the tools already running on every desktop. To that end, Wilson framed it this way:

“Hopefully we can get to a point where when we do an NPD project, we pull up SolidWorks, we pull up Visual Studio, and we pull up CoLab, like it’s a no-brainer.”