Older engineering information is often difficult to search because it lives in scanned drawings, PDFs, or legacy file systems. Optical character recognition and drawing-analysis tools can extract information from those documents, while geometry or shape matching can help engineers find similar historical parts even when they don’t know the original part number.

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Review history presents a related problem. In CoLab, feedback and decisions are captured while the review happens, which makes it easier for a future engineer to find both the earlier issue and the reasoning behind how the team handled it.

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