How can CoLab surface design issues that could have been prevented?

In this video, Liam demonstrates how to use CoLab to highlight the design issues that occur over and over during review. Uncovering these issues gives NPD teams the visibility they need to get more things right during the first design iteration. Eliminating frequent issues like this has positive downstream impact, like eliminating rework cycles, shortening design review process time and then reducing overall product development timelines.

We can do all this using a couple key features in CoLab: Tags and Insight.

Let’s dive in.

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Leveraging Tags within design issues

Engineering teams use Tags to categorize, sort and analyze design review issues. 

In the example here, Pam left a design review comment and tagged it “Mechanical.” This means this comment will be assigned to the Mechanical team to address. 

Using this Tag, teams can go even one step further, asking questions like:

• What type of issue is this? 
• Is this related to us not getting requirements, right?
• Is this related to the structural integrity of this part? 

In this case, this issue means we won’t be able to manufacture this design in its current form.

So, we can also Tag this as DFM, or design for manufacturability.

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Using Insights to analyze Tags and issues

Using CoLab’s Insights feature, we can see feedback by tag. This gives users a broader view into what Tags are used most often within individual design issues.

In this example, out of 56 issues, nine were tagged “DFM,” six as “Mechanical,” five as “Assembly Process.” Using this as a starting point, teams can start to ask questions, like:

• Why is DFM causing so many issues? 
• Do we need to bring our manufacturing partners into the design process earlier?
• Should we revisit the assembly process is it’s causing multiple design issues?
• Does the engineering team need additional training or support?

Seeing design issues categorized like this helps teams look for trends, equip the team for releasing better designs during the first iteration and bring more partners into the design conversation earlier.

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