Higher design quality means higher product quality
Your most critical product decisions are made every day in design reviews. Run better design reviews in CoLab — where your whole team can review and comment on 3D models and drawings together in real time.
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How it works
Launch products on time with one place for design review
Here’s how most engineering teams run design reviews today:
- Wait 3 weeks to align calendars for a design review meeting
- CAD screen sharing and taking notes in a PowerPoint
- Email threads with multiple disjointed attachments
These disconnected workflows mean critical design feedback is lost and never actioned. So your team suffers through late stage design changes, production failures and missed product deadlines.
CoLab gives your team one platform to create, facilitate and assess design reviews asynchronously.
So design review is no longer the barrier but the reason you deliver a higher quality product on time.
Better design feedback from more engineers – without extra meetings.
Most teams rely on meetings for all their design decision-making.
This causes a two-fold problem: it’s easy for people to check out and quiet engineers don’t participate.
Better design reviews start with enabling asynchronous feedback so everyone participates. Then, when a meeting occurs, teams control CAD on their own screen while reviewing others’ feedback. Individuals can also “follow” one another as the CAD is manipulated on screen.
Teams who use CoLab launch better products on time because meetings center around problem-solving and everyone’s feedback is heard.
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Traceable design review means better design decisions
Most engineers spend hours to days searching for that one comment to justify a design decision. Because those decisions live in PowerPoint decks, spreadsheets and email threads – or worse, they were never recorded at all.
So, what happens? Those design decisions are never actioned and late stage design changes delay the product launch.
Conducting design reviews in CoLab means all feedback is collected and cataloged automatically in one place. Meaning engineering teams bring design decisions out of untrackable places and into a traceable database. So, your team addresses every design decision before the drawing gets to production.
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Integrations
You don’t need yet another disconnected software solution. That's why CoLab does two things:
- integrates with your CAD and PLM software to create a connected tech ecosystem.
- It replaces the 5-10 apps you use to complete a single process workflow with 1-2 apps (CoLab + PLM, for example)
CoLab supports more than 70 file types, including native and neutral CAD and integrates with many PLM/PDM systems.
Aside from engineering system integrations, CoLab also integrates with Jira and supports security protocols, like SSO, user permissions and more.
Design review case studies
Engineering teams use CoLab to do design reviews nearly every day. Here are a few who want to share their experiences with you:
Schaeffler knew they needed to transform how their engineering team approached design reviews. So, Schaeffler’s digitalization team launched CoLab to help engineers give more feedback, simplify design review management and reference historical designs.
Chief Engineer Max Podschwadt explains, “Colab helps to improve quality. It provides more team members with easier access to review models and prints, which leads to overall better reviews.”
Komatsu Australia hit its limit with the high cost of late stage design changes. Using CoLab, Komatsu now validates designs with key stakeholders early and often – allowing the team to exceed customer expectations and capitalize on industry growth.
“The benefit that CoLab provides is so much visibility, communication, and stakeholder management that a lot of the stress around engineering design dissipates.””
FAQs about using CoLab for Design Review
How engineering teams use CoLab
Whether you’re discussing a prototype or a production drawing, CoLab makes sure everyone is on the same page. Review designs together, in 3D, and pin feedback directly to a model or drawing.
It shouldn’t be hard to tap into your supplier’s expertise. Whether you need DFM feedback or you’re running a multi-supplier RFQ, CoLab makes it easy to share CAD and drawings, exchange design feedback, and approve revisions.
With CoLab, you can make design expertise your competitive advantage. Run interactive technical evaluations with prospective customers to stand out in RFQs and grow your business.
CoLab helps engineering teams achieve 6, 7, and 8-figure cost reduction targets by giving you a repeatable way to run highly engaging value analysis events with groups of any size.
Better products start with better design conversations.
If you’re ready to see how CoLab can transform the way you work with suppliers, here’s how the process works.
- Every conversation starts with a discovery call. During this call, a technical expert will understand your team’s challenges with design review today
- Then, we’ll tailor a demo to address those challenges. This demo includes you, of course, but also some key members from your team who can speak to your challenges in greater detail and vet CoLab as the solution.
- Finally, we do a workshop with more members of your team. This is the fun part! During this workshop, your team will each have temporary CoLab licenses and participate in a sample design review. You and your team will be guided through key features and use cases right inside the CoLab platform.