Case Study: Delta Development Team achieves 20% more design time and faster collaborative medical-device development with Onshape

Delta Development Creates a Portable Medical Refrigerator to Help Wounded Troops

Delta Development is a 13-person Tucson R&D firm that designs military cooling and heating systems and was contracted by the U.S. Air Force to build the Autonomous Portable Refrigeration Unit (APRU) — a rugged, single-person‑carriable medical refrigerator. The team’s small size and multi-role engineers were hampered by an on-premise, file-based CAD workflow and IT overhead that consumed roughly 20% of their product design time, while also facing a difficult miniaturization challenge to shrink a hospital-style fridge into a 29‑lb, battlefield-capable unit.

Delta switched to Onshape’s cloud-native SaaS CAD platform, enabling browser-based, real-time collaboration, full edit history and remote design reviews. The move reclaimed the 20% of design time lost to IT, let multiple engineers work simultaneously on the same 3D model, supported remote work during COVID, and accelerated development and deployment of the APRU — now in use with U.S. and allied special operations and other field teams.

Delta Development Team

Bill Barg

Chief Engineer