CoCreate aids collaboration on product design

As companies extend their supply chains, collaboration becomes more critical and more difficult because of the greater number of participants in the process and their increased geographic distribution. Collaboration tools are very useful to get around some of the problems that arise from this expansion.

An interesting company that provides a collaboration application aimed at product designers and others is CoCreate, a former division of HP that originally produced computer-aided design (CAD) software.

Now an independent company, CoCreate offers products that marry CAD design tools and collaboration, so that geographically distributed teams can collaborate on designs in real time. OneSpace.net is CoCreate’s collaboration tool that enables real-time or offline design review meetings to which participants are invited via e-mail – either Microsoft Outlook or Lotus Notes is used as the vehicle for updating tasks, synchronizing calendars and providing other information.

Using OneSpace.net, a group of engineers can meet to review CAD drawings and other information using a sort of shared whiteboard. They can draw data from multiple systems and can store all of their information for offline access by engineers who are part of the design process but who might not be able to participate in a particular meeting. All of the changes that are made in a collaboration session are then synchronized with the desktop tool for offline users who can review the changes at a later time; their changes then are fed back to the other users.

CoCreate cites a survey that indicates that 30% of product development time is spent waiting for design reviews. The advantage of tools like OneSpace.net is that it a) extends the concept of collaboration to a broader audience of engineers, product designers and the like who might not otherwise participate in real-time decision making; and b) it can significantly shorten the amount of time required to design a product.