9 benefits of re-using your designs

1. Accelerated time to market

Re-using existing, validated designs, drastically reduces the time required to develop a new product or variant. Engineers can skip repetitive tasks and quickly adapt proven models, enabling a faster response to customer demands or market trends. With a CAD solution, such as PTC Creo, design teams can quickly retrieve and adapt modular components, while adding a Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) solution, such as PTC Windchill, ensures version control and traceability.

2. Improved design quality

Design reuse leverages previously validated models, which often contain the hard-earned lessons of past testing, compliance, and field performance. This increases the probability of achieving a high-quality design the first time around.

A PLM solution ensures that reused designs carry their complete change history and associated documentation, making it easier to understand and trust the performance of reused components.

3. Cost reduction in engineering and manufacturing

Re-using a design not only reduces design hours, it often leads to shared components in manufacturing, which means fewer unique parts, reduced tooling costs, and streamlined inventory. Companies that design for reusability can reduce part counts, leading to significant savings across procurement and logistics.

4. Enhanced collaboration across teams

When teams across departments - engineering, product management, manufacturing - work from a common, unified repository of reusable components, collaboration becomes simpler and more effective. PLM software facilitates this by managing a central digital thread for product data, accessible by all stakeholders that need that information.

5. More accurate and efficient BOM management

Re-used components tend to be better documented and connected to accurate Bills of Materials (BOM). This is critical for production planning, compliance, and service documentation. This combined with a Product Lifecycle Management solution, ensures that each instance of a reusable component is correctly referenced, with up-to-date data and change tracking.

6. Simplified approach to modular design

Design reuse is at the heart of modular design strategies, which allow companies to mix-and-match components to meet diverse customer needs without redesigning every element. This modular approach promotes scalability and simplifies product line expansion.

7. Support for sustainable product development

Using existing designs reduces the need for additional prototypes, tooling, and redundant development cycles - all of which consume materials, energy, and time. Moreover, reused components often come with established environmental data, making it easier to evaluate and optimize the carbon footprint of new products.

8. Easier compliance and risk management

Reused component designs that have already passed certification or regulatory checks lower the risk of non-compliance. For industries with strict safety or quality standards (e.g., aerospace, automotive, or medical devices), this is a major advantage. A PLM solution provides full traceability, so compliance documentation can be linked directly to each part.

9. A strategic lever for Industry 5.0

Industry 5.0 puts human creativity and innovation at the centre of manufacturing while integrating advanced digital tools. By removing repetitive design tasks, engineers can focus more on high-value activities like user-centric design, and sustainable innovation.