Early Product Development lifecycles and workflows

Hello, We're in the middle of implementing Aras.  We're an engineering services and contract manufacturer for medical devices.  A lot of what we do is in early product development for our customers.  Currently we use revisions in our PDM (MechWorks) so we can go out and order components for early prototype builds/mockups, testing, or informal verification. We don't perform ECR/ECO on these are they're still in that prototype phase (i.e. we're still making something).  The plan is to bring all our processes into Aras, but we don't want to have to apply ECO to that early development. Once we move into our "Alpha/Beta" phases the Express ECO is great and going to solve a lot of challenges. Curious if there are others out there that have a similar business model and what approach you took with Aras for the early development phase? Thanks, Ben