Case study
Munich Electrification is a company specializing in developing cutting-edge battery management systems, control and sensing components and an advanced software framework.
#easy-migration
#hardware-design-process
#various-ECAD-formats
#external-collaborators
#visualize-schematic-layouts
#meeting-deadlines
#Git-powered
Testimonial
Marcos, a Hardware Engineer at Munich Electrification, and his team are responsible for evaluating tools and developing workflows to improve how they can support their colleagues.
Life before allspice.io
“Before AllSpice.io, we were solely using Altium’s ecosystem and were not happy with the way it was working. Using Concord Pro, we had to migrate all of our designs over. We didn’t have much trust in Altium 365’s complicated migration process.”
“Past tools were extremely slow – everything ran locally, and then Git was managed elsewhere. This was one of the biggest headaches. It was really easy for all of us to reach an agreement on trying AllSpice.io to improve our hardware design process.”
AllSpice gives us visibility of our ECAD projects – we can track and access everything nicely. Reviews, diffs, etc. Compared to other solutions, it’s really nice having something agile that doesn’t take 30 minutes to load.
I’d describe AllSpice as Visual, Fast, and Collaborative.
Process improvement
“When we came across AllSpice.io, it was a great opportunity to migrate our designs to a platform that would provide more transparency across our team. If there’s a problem we can easily fix, we all need greater visibility into that”, said Marcos. “That occasionally means collaborators external to our company as well. There’s no room for layering on performance issues we ran into using other tools at such a critical time in the design process.“
“Trust was an important factor in choosing your platform. We were stuck in an environment where we were bound to work with Altium.” Being locked into an established way of doing things, common with other legacy tools, was something the team was looking to move away from. “With AllSpice.io, we can easily use any type of ECAD format. That level of flexibility was extremely important to us.”
Migration of design files
Migration of designs was also crucial in deciding what their hardware team’s tech stack looked like. “Without AllSpice.io, migrating designs and transitioning between formats would have been far more complicated. You would hope that moving from Altium to non-Altium solutions would be simple, but it’s not so easy in their ecosystem.”
Many engineering teams, and both SMBs and enterprises, often utilize proprietary tools developed in-house. “Connecting with our company’s proprietary tools would have been impossible with other platforms. AllSpice.io’s API made it easy to connect with our interior tools.”
Leveraging the power of Git also helped their team work more seamlessly together. “Git is much more ideal than other workflows. Its traceability saves us time, which has helped us be more agile.”
One of our favorite features is the ability to visualize schematics layouts in a fast and dynamic way. Having AllSpice makes it much easier to access and understand our complex designs.
Consolidated communication channels
“As we grow as a team and begin conducting design reviews solely within AllSpice.io, there’s huge potential for giving us back time. Instead of communicating in Altium, Jira, emails, and PDFs, we can capture everything in one place.”
Onboarding new employees
Getting new hardware team members up and running is critical in meeting design cycle deadlines. “When I joined the company, our previous tools made onboarding very tough. With AllSpice.io, onboarding new employees is a lot better. Investing time in understanding Git is well worth it. And with many people already understanding Git, the first time using AllSpice.io is super easy and straightforward – everyone can use it.”