Cut NPD cycles by 50%

How it works

Initiate critical product conversations early and often

Only 20% of engineering teams today get useful feedback from suppliers – and only 6% from customers. And it’s not because these groups don’t have valuable feedback to give. 

It’s that it’s too hard to solicit their feedback during the NPD process. So teams just don’t.

Using CoLab, engineering teams bring external collaborators into a secure online portal. Here, suppliers and customers leave design feedback directly on 3D models and participate in product conversations asynchronously. 

By gathering critical product feedback before a design gets to prototype, engineering teams reduce NPD timelines – and build better relationships with suppliers and customers. 

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.

However, that problem is tough to diagnose because there’s no platform to tell you why your team missed key milestones.

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.

Pinpoint product errors before a pilot build

You’re not alone. Nearly every engineering team wants to solve for late stage product errors. And most realize this could be solved by catching errors earlier with higher quality design reviews.

Teams that use CoLab catch more errors during design review and slash rework cycles. Some companies have even eliminated rework cycles altogether (seriously! Ask us about it).

By shifting expensive rework out of testing and into design, where failures are caught before they happen, NPD teams deliver a better quality product faster.

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. Here are a few who want to share their experiences with you:

‍Johnson Controls uses CoLab to create a space for more collaborative interactions to happen across global teams. And as a result, the JCI team has used CoLab to consistently hit their product targets.

‍Ford Pro uses CoLab to collaborate with customers during the NPD process. Before, Ford Pro manually responded to requests from customers to share CAD files. 

“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 uses CoLab to speed up product development cycles and bring more people into the design review process. “We’re able to get real-time feedback on the design from suppliers,” says Kevin Walters, Senior Director of Hardware Engineering.