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Over the past year, we’ve been fortunate enough to engage with 100+ hardware teams. These teams come from many industries: including automotive, industrial automation, aerospace, consumer electronics, and medical devices. Each of these teams strive to create a structured process around product development in an effort to reduce risk and move faster. The instant attraction to Bild, as a core design review tool, grew into a workflow across entire organizations. Bild enabled teams to cut review times by 40%, removed the need for thousands of screenshots across hundreds of slide decks, and significantly decreased the risk of misbuilds. But alongside Bild, each team we worked with had either considered a PDM or felt like their current PDM system was not delivering its promised value.
Teams that were not on PDM:
Most design data live either in silos on local computers or on cloud solutions like Google Drive and Dropbox. Files were then passed around via email and with screenshots on slide decks. Neither of those practices were built for hardware development, nor offers the necessary foundation to collaborate on visual hardware designs. Collaborating on Google Drive or Dropbox did not provide robust version control, show design dependencies, or eliminate design overrides. There also was no easy way to render models or integrate project management. Teams felt the struggles of developing hardware assets with those tools and sought after PDM systems to decrease risk and increase collaboration. However, existing solutions were all extremely difficult to use, too expensive, and required substantial workflow changes.
Teams that were already on PDM:
For those that were on PDM, we integrated Bild into their systems as a way to lower the burden of infrastructure change. Over time, we noticed that their PDMs began bottlenecking design efficiency and workflows limited teams to freely engage on designs and design-related files. Team’s started looking more to Bild to fill the gaps that PDM left behind.
With a strong demand for more robust data management that’s accessible to growing companies and the evident gaps legacy solutions have left behind, we decided to rebuild the PDM experience from the ground up and integrate it into Bild. Today, we’re excited to introduce Bild’s cloud PDM: the first platform to bring together cloud storage, PDM, design reviews, and project management.
Information dispersion happens when teams use separate systems to store designs, manage data, and collaborate. Getting the full picture becomes difficult, time consuming, and wastes precious engineering resources. It leads to decisions being made without full context, unaddressed issues, and lack of understanding on project statuses. Legacy PDM systems have only driven change around designs (due to their inaccessibility) and not design-related files, such as PRDs, BOMs, factory data, etc. This has created numerous repetitive workflows, made having a single-source-of-truth difficult, and decreased cross-functional engagement.
With Bild’s integrated solution, teams can host data, run efficient design reviews, and manage projects all in one place. When design data and information are presented together, teams are able to get a holistic view to make better decisions faster and with less risk.
With simplicity and speed in mind, Bild’s cloud PDM enables companies to adopt robust version control and data management practices in a matter of minutes. Legacy tools take weeks to months to migrate data, onboard, and learn, but with Bild, that gets cut down to minutes. Migrating data is easy with one-click solutions. Teams do not have to worry about creating bandwidth to introduce a PDM solution or spending time learning complex systems. With Bild, teams are onboarded in a 45-minute session and can collaborate right after.
Legacy solutions also need multi-year commitments and can start at $50,000/year for most teams. Sale cycles are long, hidden fees and maintenance costs build up, and teams end up with a bulky, slow solution. The industry deserves a 21st century experience: an affordable solution that scales with your team, is accessible anywhere, is intuitive, and fast. With Bild, teams can get started at a fraction of the cost with no annual commitments. As teams grow, they can upgrade their plan to meet any future requirements.
We’ve thought carefully about the next generation of hardware teams and recognized their desire to be cloud connected and cloud native. Legacy solutions focus too little on the necessary ease of use of cloud solutions and rather focus on “enabling access” to their existing platform through the web. This creates a divide in expectations and reality.
Expectation: an easy, intuitive platform to manage design data and collaborate on the cloud.
Reality: a complicated, outdated interface that’s filled with features, but too difficult to learn and integrate any of them into workflows.
Bild’s cloud PDM is here to bridge the gap, and we are excited to deliver a modern and fast solution to companies that have not made the jump to PDM.
We’ve already deployed cloud PDM to many of our existing customers along with bringing on new teams. What’s astonishing is that teams that would not have otherwise thought of using a PDM system, such as electrical engineering, manufacturing, and project management teams, are able to leverage Bild’s cloud PDM as their central data management platform. For companies that were tied to their legacy PDM system, internal teams are leveraging Bild to drive better design reviews and hardware project management.
We understand your pain, and we want to support your growth. If you are interested in learning how you can increase engineering bandwidth and improve collaboration, reach out to us at contact@getbild.com.