Online engineering collaboration works for Woco

Eur 600m German automotive engineering development firm Woco, which also manufactures in Carrick-on-Shannon Ireland, reckons its accelerating clients’ projects using a low cost collaborative engineering system. The firm, which specialises in acoustics, vibration technology and vehicle comfort, went for the OneSpace.net online system from CoCreate. Matthias Wolthaus, Woco design manager, says not only is it streamlining interaction with both customers and its sales team, but it’s working well with the existing development processes and the firm’s engineering applications. He explains: “As a world-wide primary developer for the automotive industry, we work with geographically dispersed project teams, suppliers and customers in many ‘build-to-order’ projects… “The product is unusually easy to implement, and from what we have seen, all of our users can be productive within 20 minutes. We [can] communicate with our customers quickly, efficiently and personally, without ever leaving the office.” Specifically, he cites the system’s virtual meeting facilities and its shared markup system in which users can mark up their views directly without the native application running locally. “Online meetings let us make decisions quickly and implement them accurately, accelerating our time-to-market without sacrificing quality,” he comments. In fact, 3D models of any origin can be viewed, inspected, measured, changed and marked up. Every team member can see every new change so that misunderstandings are avoided. “OneSpace.net will accelerate our product development cycles while simultaneously lowering costs and helping us maintain personal customer relationships,” says Wolthaus.