Today, CoLab AI Inc. announced a multi-year expansion of its enterprise collaboration with Schaeffler AG, consolidating three previously separate agreements — with Schaeffler, Vitesco Technologies and Ewellix — into a single global contract. CoLab is now the standard design review environment for more than 1700 Schaeffler engineers across North America, Europe and Asia, in a relationship that began with a single pilot team in 2022.

The expansion comes as Schaeffler works through two transformations at once. Its merger with Vitesco Technologies and acquisition of Ewellix created one of the largest engineering organizations in mobility. At the same time, Schaeffler is moving more of its engineering data and workflows to the Cloud, as part of a publicly stated cloud-first strategy. Both come down to the same question: whether engineers across a newly combined organization can make decisions together as one engineering team.

“Accelerating product development is one of our highest priorities, and collaboration is where we have the most to gain,” says Rainer Eidloth, Senior Vice President, Engineering Digitalization & IT at Schaeffler AG. “Our engineers need one place to review a design together and understand the thinking behind it. CoLab provides that extra layer, and it must work across both our current and future engineering environments.”

The environment Schaeffler is building gives CoLab a distinct role. The Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) system is the authoritative record of what a design is — versions, approvals, access controls. CoLab is where engineers understand why it should be that way. CoLab is extending the capabilities of its PLM integrations to operate with cloud-based PLM, as Schaeffler completes their migration.

“Like many of our customers, Schaeffler recognizes that design collaboration is critical to their goal of accelerating product development” says Adam Keating, Co-Founder and CEO of CoLab. “By giving their engineers and cross functional teams a single place to review designs, Schaeffler is not only speeding up design cycles but also capturing critical design rationale, which can serve as the foundation for AI-driven product development.”

Review cycle times have fallen significantly and CoLab is becoming the standard way design reviews are run across the merged company. Engineers reach decisions faster because the information needed to justify each one sits alongside the design itself.

Schaeffler’s rapid adoption of CoLab is unique in that it took place during a period of PLM consolidation and migration. In spite of this, Schaeffler kept reviews and programs running smoothly, with CoLab acting as a connective layer across multiple CAD and PLM tools:

“Bringing three engineering organizations together is a multi-year effort, and our programs could not wait for it,” says Prashant Reddy, Director of Engineering Digitalization and IT, Americas, at Schaeffler. “We needed engineers from Schaeffler and former Vitesco and Ewellix reviewing designs together, regardless of which PLM or CAD environment they relied on. Starting with one team in 2022, CoLab is now how our engineers work across the globe.”

About CoLab

CoLab builds AI-powered software for mechanical engineering and hardware development teams. Its EngineeringOS platform helps engineers make better, faster design decisions by connecting people, data, and AI in one collaborative workspace—capturing expert knowledge as a natural part of day-to-day work.

With AI agents built into the platform, CoLab enables teams to apply that knowledge automatically to improve design quality and accelerate product development. Founded in 2017, CoLab is trusted by leading global manufacturers to drive decision velocity and bring better products to market, faster.

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