In new business-to-business relations within the aerospace industry, companies join together in partnership to perform product development, taking full responsibility for their product during its entire life cycle. This paper describes a method on how these downstream effects can be simulated in a cross-company collaborative situation. A case study was conducted where a jet engine component manufacturer and a tool manufacturer used each other's expertise in a collaborative approach to make "holes" in a jet engine component. Ten conceptual jet engine frames were collaboratively evaluated within two working days. The distributed engineering environment creates a new situation for the partnership companies by allowing them to work efficiently within the activities that have been incorporated into the distributed engineering environment. Downstream effects of the overall system can then be evaluated already in the conceptual phase, thus allowing the partners to design the life cycle properties of their common product.