Quickly and Easily Visualize New Product Concepts

Royal Philips, founded in 1891 in the Netherlands is one of the largest electronics companies in the world, employing over 105,000 individuals in over 100 countries. It is a leading health technology company with a keen focus on improving people’s health. This spans from healthy living, to diagnosis, treatment, and home care. Philips puts strong emphasis on leveraging the latest in technology, design, and deep consumer insights when developing each of the products in its broad portfolio. The company is a leader in diagnostic imaging, image-guided therapy, patient monitoring and health informatics, as well as consumer health and home care.

At Philips, design is a key aspect of the company’s success. According to Philip’s Design Manifesto, “Design is at the heart of our company, shaping the way people experience our brand, products and services. In fact, everything you see from Philips has been designed. As proud custodians of the Philips brand, we make sure design is always the starting point for innovations. And it plays a central role in our business strategy: driving everything we bring to market.”

Jens Andersson joined Philips 3.5 years ago and is a Design Lead at Philips Design. Jens is primarily responsible for the industrial design of products in the Male Grooming department. This consists of shavers, beard trimmers, hair clippers, and more. In his role, Jens also works with other teams to design products including health care, personal health, and CT scanners. Jens is not only responsible for working with marketing and engineering to bring new products to market, but is also, together with the team, tasked with coordinating the brand’s portfolio management and 5-year plan.
,br> A little over three years ago the team at Philips set out to find a new piece of software for their team that would work better than their current tools. The goal was to find one tool that could be used by all members of the team. This would help to create consistency, easy file transfer/handoff with design peers and engineering, and would increase overall team speed and efficiency. Jens was selected for the Evolve pilot program and set out on a 1-week training course with the tool. Shortly after the course and some one-on-one training, Jens utilized Evolve on a live project.

Evolve in the Design Process

Since learning Evolve, Jens has used Evolve on a number of projects, including three that have already gone to market, as well as multiple strategic projects that Philips is currently exploring in health care, male grooming, and personal health. When asked about Evolve, Jens noted, “As a designer, we are always under pressure to deliver results in a short period of time, Evolve has been a big advantage for me over other conceptual CAD packages. Its construction history features allow me to adapt my models for both business or technical reasons while development is ongoing verses starting from scratch.” Jens also commented on the speed of the tool, “With Evolve I can quickly react and tweak the design while keeping the original design intent. It allows me to work on many quick iterations to visualize different options and solutions. This is very key to our development at Philips as it allows all stakeholders to be involved in the feedback process. I build so much faster in Evolve than what I have ever done in other software before.”