Design reviews have 
not kept pace with engineering innovation

Reviewing designs should be as productive as developing the product itself

Automotive EV programs want new vehicles in the market in half the time. SpaceX sent more satellites into orbit in the last 5 years than all previous years combined. Medical device manufacturing facilities are expanding faster than ever to keep up with growing demand.

It’s not news to anyone in engineering that the mounting pressure to launch the highest quality product into the market as fast as possible is only rising.

Yet, engineering teams continue to struggle through the same early product development issues they suffered 5, 10, 15+ years ago:

File sharing is too hard.

Not everyone has the right CAD license so you settle for screenshots or free CAD viewers. Then, when you can send files, email is your only option for transmission and it takes hours to find information buried in the threads.

Meetings take too long.

Too long to schedule. Too long to get everyone’s feedback. Too long to wait for the issues list to make it to the next model version. If there is a major common thread between all engineering teams, it’s that design review meetings take far too long.

Every step in the process is manual.

Scheduling a meeting is manual. Issue tracking is manual copy+paste into the issue spreadsheet. Finding design decisions in email threads, notes or Teams chats is all manual. This means the entire design review process is highly prone to human error. Is it any wonder that 43% of design decisions are never tracked or addressed?

Documentation is a part-time job.

With design discussions living in PowerPoint slides, emails, spreadsheets, Teams chats and notes, it takes engineers hours to days just to find a single design decision.

No standardization in the design review process.

For most teams, the way a design review is conducted is at the mercy of the engineer running the review. Then, because there’s no standard process for design review, teams lack any reference point for what makes a good or bad review.

No visibility into where a design review stands.

This is especially true for engineering leaders running multiple projects. Because there’s not central repository for design discussions, issues and decisions, they feel a lack of transparency in the entire design review process.

Approved designs have too many errors.

This point is multi-faceted. On the one hand, you have design errors that should have been caught in reviews caught too late in the process. On the other hand you have approved designs that are over-engineered, not produce-able, or require completely new manufacturing processes. Both issues end in expensive rework and/or delayed timelines.

It’s too hard to bring global manufacturing partners into early design concepts.

It’s typical for teams to bring manufacturing or suppliers into a design when it’s time for cost reduction or DFM input. But as companies exhaust these strategies, engineering teams recognize these partners have more expertise to offer. Expertise that could become a competitive advantage. But right now, there isn’t a good way to do this for all the reasons listed above. It’s just too cumbersome and too slow to bring these experts into design reviews.

And because of all these issues, engineering teams brute force product development processes.

So, while the team may meet the required stage gate timeline, the approved design has known errors. These known errors crop up in production:

But, it doesn’t have to be this way.

The solution is simple, but it’s not easy: you need to innovate how you review designs – starting from square one 🧠

Better design review starts with better tools + better processes

If we look at the problems engineering teams face in early product development, it boils down to two key gaps:

1. Bad processes (or, no processes at all)
2. Wrong tools

If we look at the other tools engineering teams use in product development, they work for what they’re intended to do. Engineers have CAD for product design and PLM for product data and record-keeping. The systems and processes built around these tools work for designing products and housing product data.

Yet, when it comes to interacting with people during product development – no dedicated tool, no dedicated processes. So teams lean on meetings, emails, spreadsheets and PowerPoint to conduct and track design reviews.

Instead what teams need is a purpose-built tool for bringing people, designs and data together when reviewing designs.

A tool that:

• Lets anyone access CAD or 2D drawings to review
• Allows reviewers to manipulate models and add feedback in the context of that model
• Automatically creates an issues list as people leave feedback
• Updates file versions with every upload, so everyone has the most up-to-date design
• Syncs with your CAD and PLM to create a seamless technology experience

Then, this tool should be paired with a minimum viable review process.

For teams just starting to build a standardized design review process, the simplest process is the best process. This starts with identifying the top 3-5 problems your team struggles with today.

The best engineering teams launch products faster with CoLab

Companies like Ford, Komatsu, Schaeffler and Schneider Electric use CoLab as their better tool for design reviews.

With CoLab these teams have completely revolutionized the way they do design reviews. No more struggling through the same problems with bad processes and the wrong tools for the job. With CoLab, these teams do design reviews differently.

And the results speak for themselves.

The companies that use CoLab see: