Catalogue Projects: Smarter Reuse of Design Control Items

We are excited to introduce Catalogue Projects, a new feature in Aligned Elements that makes re-using Design Control items and documents smarter, more efficient, and fully traceable.

Catalogue Projects allow you to build Design Control libraries that serve as centralized collections of reusable, pre-approved items, encapsulated knowledge that can be shared across multiple projects.

This new capability ensures that your team can rapidly re-use proven Design Controls and leverage already established engineering work, standing on the shoulders of previous development work.

From Copying to Controlled Reuse

The already available ways of reusing Design Control data, such as linked projects, branching-merging, copying between projects or import-export has their well-deserved places in the palette of Design Control engineering. However, as Design Control copies solves the problem to some extent, they are innately isolated from their originals. If the source item changes, the copied version stays ignorant of the change event. Synchronizing such changes is a challenge.

Catalogue Projects solve this problem by introducing reference instances of items. When you re-use an item from a Catalogue, your project creates a referenced version that maintains a connection to the original source.
If the source item changes, you can choose to push those updates to the linked items, either individually, selectively, or in bulk. This gives you the best of both worlds: consistency where needed and flexibility where appropriate.

A Central Hub for Reusable Knowledge

A Catalogue Project acts as a dedicated library for Design Control elements, as well as Design Control element chains (Requirements tracing to Specifications training to Tests), and documents (Biocompatibility reports for given materials, Toxicology tests, process validations).

When applying a Catalogue item in a target project, chapter information, attributes, and tags are applied. In the target project, selected attributes in these reused items are read-only, preserving the integrity of your approved data. However, you can still extend the target project items with additional project-specific attributes and notes. This makes it possible to tailor reused content to each project’s needs without altering the common foundation.

Full Oversight and Controlled Updates

From the Catalogue Project, you can monitor exactly where each item is being reused.
When an update occurs in the Catalogue, it requires an explicit User action to push that change downstream. You decide how broadly to apply updates:

• Cherry-pick specific items to update where it makes sense
• Perform batch updates to align multiple projects at once

This fine-grained control ensures that your projects stay current with approved content while avoiding unwanted alterations.

If more flexibility is required, you can detach the referenced instance from its source at any time and start making changes independently. 

Why Reusability Matters

As we can see, reusing Design Control items is not just a technical convenience for the individual user. It is a strategic advantage that strengthens your product development process on multiple levels:

1. Faster development and shorter time-to-market

Teams can draw on a growing library of existing, validated content instead of reinventing requirements, risks, and tests for every new project. Proven elements can be reused immediately, helping new projects start faster and reach completion sooner.

2. Consistency and standardization

Reusing standardized Design Control items ensures that core business rules, safety requirements, and regulatory standards are applied uniformly across all projects. This consistency reduces the risk of omissions, discrepancies, or non-compliance.

3. Higher quality and reliability

Each reused item has already been reviewed, approved, and tested in earlier projects. By building on trusted content, you reduce the chance of errors and maintain a higher overall quality baseline.

Building Smarter, Together, with Catalogue Projects

With Catalogue Projects, Aligned Elements evolves from a Design Control management tool into a central knowledge repository for your organization. It helps you establish compliant Design Control information, preserve it and make it available to every future project.

Reusability leads to greater consistency, faster delivery, and less risk of outdated or missing information. Most importantly, it ensures that your teams spend less time rediscovering solutions and more time innovating.