CoLab Software

We’ve entered a new era of engineering… but the collaboration tools for mechanical teams haven’t caught up yet. Until now, that is. Tired of fighting with unspecialized software? And trying to run sophisticated engineering programs that still rely on email and Excel? So were we. 😑 That’s why CoLab decided to do something about it. Watch this video to hear our CEO and co-founder, Adam Keating, explain what’s holding engineering teams back today—and how CoLab solves the problem. To learn even more about CoLab, visit colabsoftware.com *** (And a very grateful shoutout to the fine folks at m5 Marketing Communications who partnered with us to create this video!)

The knowledge needed to make a decision in a big org almost always exists. It’s just rarely documented and even more rarely used in a decision. Our study of engineering effectiveness last year found 86% of knowledge take more than an hour to find. So people revert back to relying on the memory and knowledge of themselves and those close to them. In a small org - that’s usually fine because the exposure to the orgs entire knowledge is high. In a big org - there could be thousands of people doing the same job across dozens of very similar programs all making similar decisions differently. With the rise of AI, decision making is going to change massively. Imagine if you could have the collective knowledge of your entire org not just documented but in every single decision - what would that mean for your business? Less repeat mistakes. Better standardization. Faster decisions. People keep saying data is the new oil. But until you turn it into knowledge that’s used effectively it’s closer to oil trapped in reservoirs that are impossible to drill. Make your knowledge your competitive advantage. If you don’t, your competitors will. #knowledge #engineering #effectiveness

Design review meetings are still the go-to mechanism for gathering engineering design feedback. Yet only 10% of engineering leaders believe more meetings would solve product development delays. Design-review-via-meeting leads to a host of downstream problems: 👉 87% of engineering leaders spend multiple hours-to-days searching for justification for a single design decision 👉 43% of feedback during design review is never tracked or addressed 👉 90% of companies delay some percentage of product launches due to late stage design changes Yet we still hear over and over and over again... The primary method for gathering and following up on design feedback is meetings. Meetings that last for hours, happen at inconvenient times and rarely involve all major stakeholders. It doesn't have to be this way. Design review should be a dynamic process, where teams: 🔷 Have access to the same revision at all times 🔷 Interact with each other on the model or drawing in real time or asynchronously 🔷 Gather all design issues in a single place to make product decisions Engineering leaders today believe design review quality is the # 1 predictor of an on-time product launch. And more meetings is not the tool for higher quality design review. A Design Engagement System is. #engineeringdesignreview

"It's still hard to communicate design intent." "When you're trying to do concept evaluations, it's hard to bring it to the level of complexity and invest time while knowing it's going to be worthwhile." Much of this problem lies in the way you collaborate during design and concept development today. 👉 Screenshots 👉 Meetings 👉 Marked up CAD in a viewer These are all static forms of collaboration: they occur in a moment in time. Collaboration by definition is dynamic. It should be happening all the time, everywhere, all at once. But, when you send a marked up PowerPoint deck with CAD screenshots and someone asks why the assembly was made this way... You answer that one person. And then someone else has that same feedback. And another. And another. All on different versions of the deck. Forget about when you explain it, revise the version and then someone comes back with questions about a previous version weeks later. It's a nightmare. This is why "it's hard to bring it to the level of complexity and invest time while knowing it's going to be worthwhile." Because the way concept evaluations are done today -- it's not worthwhile and the time investment to do it this way is too great. 👉 Unless, you have a system where you can send the same CAD file to everyone 👉 And you can add comments in real-time that anyone can see 👉 And you can respond to feedback from other team members 👉 And you can see other reviewers feedback in the context of the model with a single click All the time, everywhere, all at once #engineeringcollaboration #designreview

Pumped to welcome Sydney Strader as our first SVP Customer Success 🤘 Syd joins CoLab after playing a key role in the growth of several high growth startups, including most recently Catalyst Software. She blew us away in the hiring process from the moment we met her - her energy, vision, passion, approach and raw intelligence made her the perfect fit for CoLab. As part of the interview process for any leader at CoLab we believe its important that the leader deeply understands the work of their team to be effective. So we ask Syd to prepare and deliver a QBR for one of our customers with generic data and whatever she could find publicly. Safe to say - she nailed it. It was like she already worked with us. Syd will lead the customer success org as we rapidly scale customers and usage across enterprises in manufacturing industries. She will soon be hiring to scale the customer success team. In the meantime, we have 10 roles open across the board. Check out our careers page. 🤝 Huge shoutout to Taylor Young who did an incredible job leading our customer success org on top of her CSO role for the last 18 months. And a special thank you to Mona Trabelsi for the introduction! We appreciate you both! 🙏

Sharing CAD files is still one of the most difficult challenges to effective supplier collaboration in 2024. This made supplier collaboration strategies a "nice to have" for much of the last 10 years. However, the manufacturing world is changing. Company leadership puts more and more pressure on engineering teams to: 1️⃣ Launch products faster 2️⃣ Improve gross margins 3️⃣ Leverage the technical expertise of the supplier base In fact, these three initiatives were the top trends pushing engineering leaders to create more effective supplier collaboration stratigies. Meaning, engineering leaders don't just *want* to collaborate more effectively with suppliers, they *need* to. 👀 Stay tuned for the full State of Supplier Collaboration survey report coming next month! #suppliercollaboration P.S. Subscribe below to get the survey sent to your inbox!

“You'd have to be Einstein to track design decisions. Was it a Teams chat or an email? Maybe in a PowerPoint someone sent as an email attachment? It's impossible to track design data so you can actually access and use it.” This is straight from an engineering leader at a Tier 2 supplier. And the fact is: 87% of engineering leaders say it takes them multiple hours to days to find the justification for a single design decision. Why? Because design review feedback lives in too many disjointed places: 👉 Email threads 👉 PowerPoint slides 👉 Teams chats 👉 Buried in a notebook Is this really that big of a deal, though? Let's look at some other statistics: 👎 43% of all design feedback is never tracked or addressed 👎 90% of companies delay product launches due to late-stage design changes 👎 Design review quality is the # 1 predictor of an on-time product launch So, if we have nearly half of all design review feedback lost and most companies delaying product launches due to late stage changes, then yes -- this is a problem. And engineering leaders know the solution is better design reviews. The gap is: design reviews have been done the same way for the past 5, 10, 20 years for engineering teams. And most engineering leaders don't know what a better design review process or tool would look like. Let's change that. #engineeringdesignreview

🥶 One of the shortcomings of markups is they're static -- frozen in a moment in time. 🏃 Feedback is active. You can leave a static markup using feedback, but also: 👉 Assign teammates 👉 Start conversations 👉 Prioritize the issue in the greater review 👉 Use custom tags to filter feedback Every comment within feedback is also time-stamped: meaning while the individual response is static, the feedback itself is an active conversation. And can be tracked and analyzed later. This is critical for engineering teams looking to both build a design review process and improve it over time. #engineeringdesignreview

"I was able to engage directly with our Tier 2 suppliers and I still felt that process was too slow." Supplier collaboration means more than just direct access to your suppliers. It should mean real-time conversation and problem-solving despite time and geographic boundaries. Because when your supplier collaboration process still involves: 👉 Sending marked up PowerPoint over email 👉 Reconciling markups across 5+ PowerPoint file versions 👉 Manually recording issues in a spreadsheet Then, it's not collaboration. It's file sharing. And worse, your engineering team has to play administrative assistant. This should be a major concern when it comes to hiring and retaining top engineering talent. The next generation of engineers expects more from your engineering tool set. Because they *know* better tools exist. Or, they leave and create the tool they wish they had.

An ineffective design review process for an engineering team is the equivalent of an athlete having an ineffective training routine. Anyone serious about sports knows how you train is critical to how you perform. So as engineering teams, why don't we invest more in the design review process to build superior products like athletes do in training to win comps? My belief: Most folks know design reviews are critical - they just haven't seen the difference in "good" and "great" - so they struggle to connect the dots on the impact investing would have on the outcomes. Instead most teams focus on fixing specific problems and not the process that's failing them and creating the problems. The result? A perpetual hamster wheel playing wack-a-mole on issues that systematically can be designed out. Design reviews are the fundamental atomic unit of decision making in engineering. The strength, frequency and quality of that atomic unit has an outsized impact on your products quality, velocity and margins. The magnitude of that impact is often hard to understand unless you've experienced what great looks like. Good looks like most teams today - products get launched but they are often late, have more "surprises" than expected and come with corner cutting. Great looks like a step change in decision making where you get through significantly more iterations and come out with a superior product where you are investing your time in creating new value and winning. In a world that is as competitive as today's with so many external pressures - good won't cut it anymore. Treat your design review process like an athlete treats their training and make that atomic unit great. Repeat it daily and never stop improving it. In the end, your product is the summation of your product decisions. Mediocre decisions = Mediocre product Great decisions = Great product #designreview #atomicunit #effectiveness