Cut NPD cycles by 50%

Teams who use CoLab for NPD: get more stakeholders involved, track critical product feedback in one place and catch more product errors before production. Meaning they take control of their NPD process – launching higher quality products faster.

How it works

Initiate critical product conversations early and often

Design reviews fail to engage 50% of subject matter experts. This means you’re missing critical feedback from your NPD project’s most important people.

Using CoLab, engineering teams bring all reviewers into a single platform. Here, anyone can:
✅ Pin feedback directly on 3D models
✅ Participate in product conversations asynch
✅ Access a running issues list – where every issue gets tracked automatically

By gathering critical product feedback before a design gets to prototype, engineering teams reduce rework and NPD timelines by up to 50%.

Get better visibility into where every NPD project stands

It happens. Your team misses an NPD milestone. But when it happens over and over across 20+ NPD projects, there’s an underlying problem.

With CoLab, NPD leaders get a bird’s eye view of where every issue stands across every NPD project. With a better view of where review bottlenecks occur, these same leaders remove barriers faster and hit key milestones on time.

Get supplier DFM input before NPI

90% of engineering teams get supplier feedback too late during NPD. This causes moderate-to-significant rework, or worse, it waits until the next redesign.

Teams who use CoLab get critical supplier feedback when it matters most: before prototyping. By eliminating the admin-intensive job of sharing CAD and tracking issues, engineers tap into the expertise of more suppliers, earlier.

Integrations

You don’t need yet another disconnected software solution. That's why CoLab does two things: 

  • It 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.

NPD case studies

Engineering teams use CoLab to complete NPD cycles nearly every day.

Johnson Controls
uses CoLab for more collaborative reviews across global teams. 

Ford Pro
uses CoLab to collaborate with customers during the NPD process.

“We’d have to do a meeting or screenshots. Take local measurements of anything they are looking for. It can be very difficult to answer questions quickly.” explains Andrew Walden, Senior Project Engineer. Now, they use CoLab to share CAD with their partners on demand.

Mainspring Energy uses CoLab to speed up product development cycles and bring suppliers into the design review process. 

Product Redesigns

"It’s getting products to market sooner. That was our initial goal: how do we increase productivity, how do we increase the design review cycle to be able to get the products to the market sooner than what we typically had done before. And we have seen an increase, definitely, using CoLab to get there.”

Kevin walters
Brian Stauffer
Global Product Design Manager
Mainspring
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FAQs about using CoLab for NPD

If we want to invite a supplier or external collaborator, can we protect the files and data they see?

We struggle with documenting design decision-making on the original product to inform future product generations. Will CoLab provide a record of all design feedback made during the review after it's concluded?

When teams see these huge effectiveness gains for their NPD cycles, how is this measured?

Can CoLab share supporting material for design decisions, like materials, simulations and BoMs?

When you're looking at the assembly or parts in PLM, is it clear that there's a CoLab markup on that version?

Take control of every NPD project

See how you can go from project milestone delays, late stage rework and missed launch deadlines to completing NPD cycles 2x faster.

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Bring any stakeholder into the same 3D model or 2D drawing
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Generate and solve issues in real-time
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Never miss a critical issue again with automatic issue tracking
Schedule a talk with a CoLab product expert.