Alignex Mechanical Engineering & Manufacturing Blog

Removing the Documentation Bottleneck from Engineering by Beverley Barnes

Documentation has always been an incredibly time-consuming task for engineering.  In addition to the time spent creating manufacturing drawings, engineers also spend valuable hours capturing digital images, mainly from screen captures,  of their designs for both internal departments and external agencies. And every design change means a new order for artwork. This imperfect system often leads to workflow bottlenecks in engineering and costly delays in bringing products to market. Does this sound familiar?

New Options

Fortunately, new technologies now enable both engineering personnel, as well as  individuals with no CAD background to directly access design files quickly  and easily, and pull exactly the artwork they need — whether that’s a photorealistic image for a brochure or an exploded view for a set of assembly instructions.  New documentation authoring solutions, such as 3DVIA Composer, allow enterprise wide leveraging of your 3D CAD data. Now anyone can quickly create scalable vector illustrations with options to control outer line thickness, component colors, shadows, balloons, parts lists, and paper space. Generating animations for sales presentations and websites can be equally simple. By offering engineering new solutions for documentation that can also be utilized by members of your entire organization including sales, marketing, technical publications, and manufacturing, companies can free up more time for engineers to get back to design and innovation activities.

Not your Father’s Documentation Solution

In order for companies to truly appreciate the new technologies they need to first shift their thinking away from the old paradigm of looking at documentation as simply a necessary evil that’s required once a design is finalized. As manufacturers strive to find ways to become leaner, more efficient, and more competitive in global markets, generating CAD data to satisfy all the product documentation requirements of the manufacturing enterprise may hold the greatest potential for improving productivity. Instead of cutting into an engineer’s time to do high-resolution screen captures, create special exploded views, or write instructions for manufacturing, service, and market­ing purposes, you can use an integrated content authoring tool and other resources to create product graphics and illustrations directly and simulta­neously from 3D CAD models.

Now you can address all your product documentation needs—including materials for manufacturing, service, user manuals, and marketing—by using new documentation applications, like 3DVIA Composer, to repurpose 3D CAD data. Known as 3D authoring software, this kind of tool extends the utility of CAD data and automates the development of product documentation and related materials. While many organizations already leverage 3D CAD content in some fashion, a 3D authoring tool allows you to avoid the rework associated with updating CAD models to incorporate engineering changes into down­stream documentation. Software that updates content directly from the CAD model can distribute design modifications throughout all related deliverables.

Something for Everyone with Full Interoperability

As the design changes, 3D authoring software like 3DVIA Composer enables technical illustrators to create and update exploded views. Manufacturing specialists can develop and update graphics in assembly instructions, and customer service personnel can do the same in service documentation. This powerful type of authoring software also allows marketing professionals to render and update catalog images. If the CAD model changes, you can automatically update all of the related content. This concurrent approach serves to compress development time, squeeze costs out of the process, and alleviate demands on engineering, all this while maintaining the integrity of the original CAD data.

By implementing a documentation authoring solution, your company can realize greater accuracy, increased efficiency, and a more significant return on investment (ROI) within the first year. Time and cost savings related to resource reductions in publication creation, assembly operations, engineering change order (ECO) processes, and warranty claims will eclipse the cost of the solution during the first year and continue to grow with each passing year. By integrating and automating the creation of product documentation, you can decrease labor costs associated with document publication, localization of materials, and training. At an organizational level, the ROI associated with the new processes becomes most evident through shorter time-to-market, improved operational efficiencies, and better quality documentation. Best of all, you’ll be producing superior output to your competition that will not only create value but can ultimately positively impact your sales!

Explore the Possibilities

For most people, one of the best ways to truly understand the possibilities is to experience them first hand. Alignex has recently launched a company devoted exclusively to training in the area of technical visual communications and the best methodologies being used for its creation.  Visualization Academy now offers interactive training for people from ALL phases of a product’s documentation lifecycle. Classes offer participants an interactive learning experience tailored specially to the area(s) of documentation that they are most interested in or involved with including:

• Manufacturing and assembly instructions
• User manuals and product documentation
• Repair and maintenance manuals
• Training materials
• Sales & Marketing materials
• Web content
• ...and More

Just visit http://www.VisualizationAcademy.com for more information on upcoming class dates/times or visit our Alignex website for more information on 3DVIA documentation solutions.