Design reviews have 
not kept pace with engineering innovation

Design reviews are more than an inconvenience  

Let me guess. Your design review process is riddled with seemingly innocuous inconveniences.

File sharing is too hard

Meetings take too long to schedule

No central repository for design issue tracking

Information is scattered in too many places – including engineers’ brains

No standardization in the design review process

No visibility into where a design review stands

Approved designs have too many errors

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

The problem isn’t any of these inconveniences taken alone. 

1. Design review innovation starts with the simplest solution

It’s that these problems stack up… and quickly, leading to product development delays, late-stage rework and engineer burnout.
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And companies now realize this all ends in massive competitive disadvantages, like slow time-to-market, declining gross margins and lost customer contracts.

‍The solution is simple, but it’s not easy. 
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To improve product development, you need to innovate how you review designs – starting from square one. 

2. Once you know the solution, get the right tool

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

• Bad processes (or, no processes at all)
• Wrong tools

And one begets the other. Teams lean on tools like: meetings, emails, spreadsheets and PowerPoint to facilitate and track design reviews. Then, processes are built around using these tools leading to a vicious recurring cycle.

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

3. Once you have the tool, the right process builds itself

This purpose-built tool should have some key capabilities:

• Lets anyone access CAD – no specific CAD license required
• Allows reviewers to add feedback to the model
• Automatically creates an issues list
• Syncs with your CAD and PLM, so everyone works with the latest data

Then, the processes build themselves around the tool.

Because people comment on CAD earlier, you get more feedback.

Because that feedback is automatically tracked, you can prioritize and follow-up on every issue.

Because every issue is resolved, you drastically reduce errors.

Without errors, there is no rework and you launch products faster than ever before.

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 the wrong tools for the job. With CoLab, these teams do design reviews differently.

And the results speak for themselves.
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The companies that use CoLab see:

• 2x faster review cycles
• 30% reduction in lead time
• 15% lower Non-Quality Cost in the first year
• 50% reduction in BOM costs