Engineering Design Review sessions are an essential part of the product development process. The primary goal of these sessions is to understand the progress on the product, identify issues that’re hindering progress and find solutions to those issues. And unless the project manager is Dilbert’s Pointy-haired Boss, he relies heavily on the collaboration of various team members involved in the project.

During my days at Mentor Graphics, I spent quite a bit of time simulating circuits for customers using their leading-edge simulation technology. Now Mentor Graphics is offering this technology in the form of the SystemVision Cloud online circuit simulation and analysis environment, an application that helps engineering teams design and simulate analog, digital, mixed-signal and electro-mechanical systems. During a chat with Darrell Teegarden, Business Unit Director for SystemVision at Mentor, a couple of weeks ago, we brainstormed on how the SystemVision Cloud customers could better collaborate with their team members during design review sessions, using FusePLM. Let’s consider a scenario to understand this better.

The engineering teams at a fictitious laser-manufacturing company, Optonicity, are working to develop their next-generation laser module that would power their customers’ 3D scanners. The team’s latest challenge is to reduce the overheating issues seen in their last generation lasers.

During one of the design review meetings, Mike (the team’s analysis expert) suggests that he’s been exploring a Peltier/TEC-based (Thermoelectric Cooler) laser temperature regulation system to take the heat from the laser during fast-changing power dissipation conditions.

Darrell, the project manager, searches their centralized FusePLM parts repository to find no record of this module and promptly creates a part for the TEC-system for reuse in future designs. This includes the SystemVision Cloud schematic link for this part.

There’s now a single source of truth for this part, which can be access-controlled to prevent unintended edits.

He also creates an issue to track progress and notify the team members of the progress using the PLMBot.

Action items for this issue, are assigned to Mike and Marie during the design review session…

 

Mike and Marie receive the following email notifications, respectively.

 

During the course of exploration, the team adds comments to the issue/action items, and subscribers are automatically notified over email. Darrell receives notifications when Mike and Marie have completed their tasks. He can review, close the issue and release the TEC module. This ensures that the company’s proven circuits can be reused later and unauthorized edits can be prevented on the Released TEC module.

FusePLM provides a simple yet powerful workflow solution for SystemVision Cloud users to collaborate better and close design issues faster. This integration can be extended in future to pass information from FusePLM to SystemVision Cloud schematic, so that Mike can view the status of the design issues without leaving the SystemVision Cloud environment.

To explore more of how this can help your design teams collaborate better, create a free FusePLM account and a free SystemVision Cloud account.