About

Hi, I’m Zach, founder of Design Minds Consulting.

Before founding Design Minds I spent years implementing DriveWorks from inside manufacturing organizations. I know what engineering teams actually deal with because I was one of them. My DriveWorks experience spans over a decade of implementations across a range of manufacturing businesses.

Engineers should be solving real problems. Not turning the crank on a model that’s two inches longer than the last one. That’s what drew me to this work and it’s still what drives it.

I’m a Certified DriveWorks Expert, the highest individual credential DriveWorks issues, Design Minds Consulting is an DriveWorks Authorized Services Partner.

We’ve seen this before

Most implementations start the same way. Engineering is the bottleneck and the goal is to move faster. That’s a real problem worth solving.

But the organizations that get the most out of DriveWorks are the ones that think past engineering. How does information move from a customer inquiry through sales, into engineering, and out to manufacturing? What does each part of the business need, when, and in what format? DriveWorks sits in the middle of all of that. When it’s built right it’s not just automating models. It’s connecting the pieces of the business that don’t otherwise talk to each other.

We’ve built those systems. We understand what it takes to get there.

DriveWorks doesn’t make judgment calls. It just executes what it’s given. If decisions aren’t made up front and put in the right place, automation still works, but it starts encoding assumptions instead of rules. That’s what makes systems hard to change.


What that means for your project

Before anything gets built, we learn your product. What changes, what doesn’t, what edge cases your team handles without thinking about them. That product knowledge drives every architecture decision.

We get real outputs in front of you early. Not because speed is the goal, but because what you see working tells us more than the initial conversations did. That feedback shapes the project before anything drifts off track.

We’re also thinking ahead to edge cases before you raise them. The ones that don’t show up in the first walkthrough but will show up six months in. Getting those on the table early is what keeps an implementation from needing to be rebuilt to grow.

When an implementation is successful the impact isn’t dramatic on day one. It shows up over time. Fewer interruptions to engineering, more predictable quoting, and the ability to add new products without revisiting old decisions.


Who we work with

Manufacturing companies where the engineering team owns the product knowledge. Where design intent, configuration logic, and exceptions live inside your people.

That’s where getting the architecture right matters most.

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