Tools for Design Review: How to Choose

How much time and effort have you put into improving your design reviews this year? Have you looked at collaborative tools? Efficiency tweaks? Maybe you’ve read articles about the subject and aren’t sure where to start.

Jim Brown, president of Tech-Clarity, can be your guide to finding the right solution. His free 17-page report, Design Review Buyer’s Guide, is on point about the importance of design reviews and what to look for when buying review tools. He’s an independent thinker whose goal is to help you make good decisions about design reviews in your own environment.

For a quick primer on his guide, check out this video:

In the guide, Brown charges right into the business case, providing welcome assurances that change doesn’t need to be extensive or complicated to show benefits. Fundamentals matter. For example, you can level up your engineer productivity by shortening review preparation time. Doing this might be as simple as using review software that integrates with the in-house CAD tools. The ROI is easy to sell when you think of the number of engineering hours regained because you’ve cut prep time by 20%.

The report continues on to downstream departments that benefit from the philosophy of holding design reviews early and often. If you haven’t worked out design flaws before opportunity windows close, your costs of business go up because the flawed design affects everything from engineering to packaging. Again, there is concrete value in collaboration and accuracy at the beginning stages of the product’s lifecycle.

Next, Brown steps through capabilities to look for in review tools, breaking them into four subprocesses: Create, Analyze, View/Share, and Collaborate.

Create: Review tools should allow interrogation of full design mockups without requiring expensive licenses or CAD suites. This includes the ability to handle data from different CAD systems.

Analyze:  Automated validations are useful, but so is human intervention. When it comes to finding interferences or noticing missing data, it’s worthwhile to have a product that can be used by multiple teams, sites, and vendors—increasing your chances of catching problems early.

View/Share: Brown’s succinct quote says it best. “A common rule of thumb is that for every engineer, there are ten or more people that need design information to make decisions and do their jobs.”

Collaborate: Encourage feedback at every level, and use tools that make it easy. For instance, you can set up workflows that notify reviewers when changes are made, prompting them to give immediate input.

Each following section is fleshed out with more insights and recommendations, along with advice from professionals in various industries. Brown sprinkles relevant graphics and tables throughout that tie the material together. It’s a refreshing take on a problem many businesses have and struggle to find solutions to.

Eager to read the rest of Brown’s insights? Click here to get the free, full report and find out what else he has for you. (Have you made a list of vendor requirements and considerations? He has, and he shares it). Once you’re done, try PTC Creo View MCAD free and find out how it stacks up against Tech-Clarity’s recommendations.