Engineering teams are expected to achieve more with the same resources while also being held back by traditional ways of working. We call this Design review 1.0, the status quo, and it results in subpar products.
We want you to run your best design reviews ever. And you can, with Design Review 2.0
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Your most critical product decisions are made everyday in design reviews.
But as teams and assemblies get more complex, the way teams conduct design review looks the same as it did 10-20 years ago.
Then, what happens?
These aren’t problems that are solved with more meetings, better PLM workflows or increased pressure to keep PowerPoint design review decks and spreadsheets up-to-date.
These are problems that require a completely new way for engineering teams to work together.
“The way we were doing our work is the same way that everyone else has traditionally been doing their work.
Take screenshots [of a design], put that into a slide deck, and send that slide deck around for comments. Then you’re getting 10 people in a conference room for an hour.
That's how we were doing things, but we knew there had to be a better way.”
– Kevin Walters, Senior Director of Hardware Engineering at Mainspring Energy
If you want to keep doing design review the way you’ve always done it, you don’t just have frustrated engineers or long PD cycles. You have quality testing failures, expensive ECRs, high warranty claim volume, loss of customer trust, and high engineering turnover.
Design Review 1.0 is the status quo. Design Review 1.0 is design decisions lost in email threads, hours-long issue generation meetings, frequent late stage design changes.
Design Review 1.0 is why CoLab exists. CoLab is Design Review 2.0.
Design review effectiveness (quality + speed) is the #1 predictor of product development velocity. We want to help you run your best design reviews. So, your team can work together better. Here’s what that looks like:
Design review meetings should be your best opportunity to generate problem-solving ideas. Instead, they often become long meetings where only a few people participate and it’s only to point out more issues. It makes sense: only the person screen sharing CAD can really interrogate the model. They are doing a design review and everyone else is just watching one.
Using CoLab, everyone can interrogate the model on their own screen, while seeing other people’s feedback populate in real time. It’s engaging – and dare we say fun? Teams who use CoLab generate more feedback from more participants.
Most teams document their design feedback in spreadsheets, emails, or PowerPoint slides. Some teams even use free CAD viewers with markup features.
Problem is – this approach turns documentation into an administrative task. The more thoroughly you document, the more work you create for yourself and your team. And the more places they need to sift through to find the information that matters.
It disincentivizes thorough documentation and leaves room for errors to slip through the cracks.
With CoLab, reviews and decision making get tracked automatically as you do the work. Engineers can do what they do best, and CoLab will support them with record-keeping in the background.
Pinpointing bottlenecks in the review process – or understanding the real impact of continuous improvement – has always been a challenge. Why? Because engineering work takes place across untrackable communication channels. It’s not auditable, and you can’t get data on what’s happening and why.
CoLab’s gathers data about all of the human-to-human interactions that power your product decision making. That means you can objectively improve how your team evolves a design from concept to production validation.
Teams who book a demo with CoLab don’t settle for 10% efficiency gains.
They want to transform the way they work together.
If you’re ready to talk about how you can have more productive design collaboration, schedule a time to talk with a technical expert.
Here’s what you can expect:
“We’re now starting to work with conversion partners through CoLab years before we’re ready to go into production, which historically is when they’d see that first bit of product.”
"With our normal in person events we’d find more than 100 opportunities for value-add on the models we’re reviewing. This year with our virtual events in CoLab, we’re averaging over 200."
"Something that used to take a full year, we got it done in six months. And I personally have never overseen a cost reduction redesign of that scale — in terms of the number of parts and the amount of complexity — and been able to hit a 50% cost reduction on it.”
