How Collaborative Development Tools can Empower Business

Collaborative development solutions have existed for years, but it took a pandemic-driven quarantine to create the “perfect storm” for adoption. Once only embraced by large internationals and those with experts in far-flung places, design, simulation, and development software has empowered the electronics industry in ways both foreseen as well as unseen.

For example, Kinetic Vision is an advanced technology integrator serving a broad array of industries including medical, consumer electronics, transportation, aerospace and consumer packaged goods. Creating solutions for multiple categories, including smart product and medical devices, packaging, quality engineering, machine learning, AR/VR, digital twins, and visual communication.

Kinetic Vision’s expertise and toolset enables them to meet complex product development challenges with an efficient concept-to-production solution. In this case, Altium Designer is Kinetic Vision's tool of choice when it comes to designing PCBs, With the Covid situation, using Altium’s platform became even more essential as it enabled seamless remote working and has actually increased their levels of productivity to 5 times their pre-Covid rate.

Michael Weston serves as Team Lead for Kinetic Vision’s Embedded Development Group. He is responsible for day-to-day operations as well as long-range planning for the group, which includes electrical engineering and simulation, PCB development, smart product development, IoT devices, and sensor integration. He is also responsible for software application development and integration for the Embedded Development team, and we sat down and talked to him about things.

EE: The idea of advanced cloud-based collaborative design solutions has been around for a reasonably long time, depending upon how you look at it. To the younger engineers, it's been going for a while. For the older engineers, it can be just an interesting new trend. How much do you see the expanding world of cloud-based collaboration because of current circumstances? How much of this is circumstance, and how much of this is designed?

Michael Weston: That's an interesting question. I think everything's moving towards cloud-based solutions, there's no question. There is some sensitivity with issues, especially with large companies that handle a lot of IP. There's a security concern there. But realistically, a lot of that has been solved. It's just getting people comfortable with where it's going. Our company, Kinetic Vision, has transitioned to a cloud-based solution years ago. We do collaborative work via Microsoft and Google products. I mean, having done that before COVID, it made a huge difference going into COVID. It almost didn't affect our efficiency, because we rolled into everybody working in different environments with the same types of software.

So there are definitely benefits to it. And it was easier for a company like us to adopt something like Altium 365. But I think as other companies become more comfortable with it and continue to adopt cloud-based solutions, I think it will become maybe not the final form. It's hard to say the final form, but it's definitely the next step.

EE: Another reason that I wanted to talk to you about this, is Altium has a lot to say about their products. All companies have a lot to say about their products, but the users often have different experiences. And I'm curious, how much have your experiences with Altium 365 matched your expectations?

Michael Weston: Well, I'll tell you what, going from the solution that we had before, to Altium, it was like dealing with Excel spreadsheets to moving to some all-in-one software solution. It was a pretty big change, and it was so much better integrated. The whole process was so much better integrated that, I mean, it was significantly... It took a bit to learn and figure out how to use the software. But transitioning from where we were before, I don't even have words to describe how different and how much more effective our process became.

EE: Got it, got it. Now, every solution has peripheral advantages beyond the primary target. What additional force multipliers, what additional benefits have you discovered that you hadn't expected from it?

Michael Weston: So obviously, the collaborative work features were huge during COVID. But a lot of the changes made our process more effective. There was a transition period where we were working with both our old system and our new system. And the compatibility, and being able to throw files from a different system in there, and rebuild and recreate things with BOM management solutions and stuff, was excellent. Even though we had already designed it, having built-in features like Octopart integration, and cloud-based managing of bills of materials, parts ordering, stock-outs, that was something that we didn't buy the software for, because it did that. It just changed how effective we were at getting parts out the door, or getting orders out the door for designs and whatnot.

Our beginning-to-end cycle of designing something, some of the stuff that we didn't consider was putting the order together at the end, it's entirely automated now. We do that in a few clicks, versus having an engineer paid to sit there and put a bill of materials together for hours. That's my favorite feature. I highlight that because when you're looking at the efficiency and resourcing, it's crazy that a piece of software like Altium, which is just a PCB design software, it can affect how easy it is for us to handle resourcing, because I don't have to worry about somebody to put together a bill of materials. That's pretty interesting to me.

EE: It's pretty interesting to me too, Michael, when you think about that. Of course, anything that can optimize a supply chain on both ends, that's a whole different set of cascading benefits. One last question about this, and it puts into context some of the things observed in the industry lately. And that's the migration of test and evaluation from a task to part of the process. Once upon a time, you thought of something and you tested it, and then you got some parts together and you tested it, and then you made a prototype and you tested it.

Now, you're designing in a simulation, and you're manufacturing in an automated Six Sigma test-at-every-station environment. In modern products, you even have monitoring in the field with over-the-year software updates. What's your thought on that migration of tests from a task to an experience?

Michael Weston: One of the interesting features that we didn't have prior to Altium, was... Well, our company does a lot of simulation engineering work. We have an entire building dedicated to it. That has always been ingrained in our process. There are people at our company that do the A to B of a project, from start to finish, literally taking something, simulating it, perfecting it. And then it goes back into somebody else's workflow.

A company will hire us to do a small bit of simulation. Then the results of that will be injected back in the workflow to task, just like you described it. And it exits their work stream, goes to us, and then re-enters and goes back into it. And a lot of the new software, Altium included, supports doing validation work in the software. Even in tools like SOLIDWORKS or other CAD tools, that's been pretty common long term. We know how well that works in mechanical CAD. The process is pretty refined now. You basically have simulation tools that you can visualize in the same graphics window as what you're designing.

I think in the electronics world, that's going to be huge, especially for issues like, say you spin a board and you come back with an issue, you test it again, you've just lost weeks of time if you find an issue. So being able to circumvent that is cost effective, time effective, and makes it a lot easier to be profitable and run a good, functioning business.

EE: Do you have any last idea, any last words or a last idea, advice, whatever you want to leave for the audience?

Michael Weston: I regard Kinetic Vision as being on the cutting edge of processes and development. If we're working in an area, we like to adopt the higher-end, newest, fanciest way of doing it. And everybody here loves technology and exploring it. As far as Altium goes, it's been a huge factor in our embedded development group for facilitating these high technology projects, and interesting next steps, developing prototypes and all this stuff. It's key to our process at this point. It's not often that you come across software that becomes that important for your process.