Four Ways to Streamline Design Reviews and Help You Get Products Out the Door—Faster

By

You know the saying “teamwork makes the dream work?” I’m a firm believer of this, and when it comes to successful product design, collaboration is at the core of getting products out the door. As you know, a key part of getting products to market involves design reviews.

Today, I’d like to share four ways to streamline design reviews on the 3DEXPEREINCE platform.

To help design teams collaborate on design reviews, we offer Collaborative Business Innovator and Collaborative Industry Innovator on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform—two of our collaboration and data management solutions in our 3DEXPERIENCE Works portfolio. These solutions not only keep your teams connected, but help you collaborate, innovate and create together. They help you do design reviews not only in-house, but outside of your organization, with customers.

Let me show you how you can streamline your design review process with the ability to review and annotate models, analyze and resolve issues, control your data and compare product structures.

  1. Seamlessly Review and Annotate Models with 3D Review with 3D Markup

The 3D Markup functionality enables you to view, rotate and annotate the model and do your markups to communicate design concerns, identify critical issues and present the model to your team members.

One of the great things about 3D Markup is the ability to create a new slide so you can show multiple views of the model and the person who receives the markup can easily go through all the slides to see all the issues in the Slides Panel, which lists all the slides created in the markup.

You can also raise an Issue directly from the 3D Markup that will show up in the markup that can easily be seen as it’s clearly marked on the model. See the example in the slide below where the text reads “Replace Adjustment Knob sprinkler with a newer model.” That way the one who is assigned the issue can easily view the markup and access the CAD file so they can open it, make changes and save it back to the 3DEXPERIENCE platform.

 

  1. Easily Analyze and Address Issues with Issue 3D Review and Issue Management

Once you’ve created your markup and identified them, it’s time to assign them and manage them.

With Issue Management, you can then create an issue that needs to be dealt with and track, prioritize and manage it. You can see all the issues listed in the Issue Management section. For instance, one model might have multiple issues and you can see whether it has been assigned to someone and track the status.

With Issue 3D Review, you can view the information panel to see the models’ properties, such as related objects and the model that will be impacted by the issue. With Issue 3D Review you can see the issues that have been physically placed on the model in the relevant location, to help the reviewer locate components with issues. For example, if your assembly has multiple components, but the assembly itself doesn’t have an issue, there might be a related component that has a problem.

 

  1. Control Data Evolution with Collaborative Lifecycle

With the Collaborative Lifecycle functionality, you are in control— and can manage the lifecycle of your design. You can lock and unlock files, change owner and more. For instance, if you own the model, you would be able to change the ownership, and then share it by sending a direct link to that specific component.

In addition, you can see all the revisions, duplicates and branches and also create them.

 

  1. Compare and Review Product Structures

With the Compare feature you can easily compare two model revisions to see the differences in the model structure and make sure the issues have been addressed. For example, revision A has a diameter of one, but the designer has been asked to increase it by half an inch. Once the designer has made the change, it can be compared with revision B to see any geometrical differences and easily see if the updated model is correct.

It took me just about 10 minutes to demonstrate these four capabilities so if that says anything it’ll be quick and easy to use them to streamline your design review process.

If you’d like to learn more about getting started with the Collaborative Business Innovator and Collaborative Industry Innovator roles on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform, you can check out my presentation from this year’s annual user conference, 3DEXPERIENCE World.

You can access “Getting Started With the 3DEXPERIENCE Platform” here. (Requires log-in) And if you’d like to zero in on the design review capabilities I highlighted above, just skip to about 30 minutes in.

Let me know what you think by leaving a comment below.

 

Salih Alani

Salih Alani

Salih Alani joined SOLIDWORKS in 2013. He held SOLIDWORKS technical support position focused on core SOLIDWORKS, DraftSight, licensing (Online Licensing), and Lead Technical Support of 3D CONTENTCENTRAL, Technical Support Account Manager for Enterprise Subscription Services (ESS) customer account and lead organizer for VAR Performance Tuning Workshop in Dassault Systèmes Waltham before he joined the SOLIDWORKS Product Management Team in 2020. He is now focused on 3DEXPERIENCE SOLIDWORKS and SOLIDWORKS cloud roles along with collaboration on the 3DEPERIENCE Platform. Salih Alani is Graduate of the University of Technology, Iraq - Baghdad with BS in Mechanical Engineering, graduate of Northeastern University with a Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering, specializing in mechanics and design.