CATI Tech Notes

SEED PATTERN WARNING MESSAGE

I ran acoss this little gem the other day while teaching Essentials. It doesnt just fail with no explanation anymore. It actually gives a brief description of what might happen......

 

Todd Werginz

Technical Analyst

CATI

 

 

 

Leverage Solidworks to win business

Have your products ever been delayed because the documentation wasn't ready? Or, have you ever lost out on a bid because your presentation materials weren't compelling enough? You're not alone.

Instead of waiting until a project is done to get started, 3DVIA Composer lets you start creating documents almost as soon as the design process begins. See how SolidWorks and 3DVIA Composer work together to help you be more productive and win more business

Rajat Trehan

Product Manager

Computer Aided Technology Inc. 

More SolidWorks Tips for Microsoft Excel

Last week I posted links to tips for using Microsoft^® Excel and SolidWorks.  Here is a link to an additional 6 videos to help you use Excel with SolidWorks.

Watch Videos - SolidWorks Tips for Microsoft Excel Part 2

Microsoft^® Office Excel helps designers and engineers organize their design data, manage design information, and communicate statistics and ideas. Excel can also help solve difficult design problems. It can accelerate calculations as well as control all aspects of a SolidWorks model.

Watch Videos - SolidWorks Tips for Microsoft Excel Part 2

SolidWorks Sustainability 2012

Solidworks has built Life Cycle Assessment tools to measure environmental impact of your 3D model. Every license of SolidWorks comes equipped with SolidWorks Sustainability, try it. click on evaluate and then pick SolidWorks Sustability.

Check out this short video showcasing Sustainability.

 

Rajat Trehan

Product Manager - Design Validation

Computer Aided Technology Inc.

Streamline Product Documentation With 3DVIA Composer - Part 7

Part 7. Conclusion

As manufacturing organizations strive to identify ways to save time, cut costs, and improve their competitiveness in global markets, mining the value contained in their product design and 3D CAD digital assets holds great potential for substantially improving productivity. By automating downstream product information publishing functions—ranging from assembly, manufacturing, and field-service instructions to product documentation, training, and marketing materials—your company can realize shorter times-to-market, improved operational efficiencies, and better quality documentation.

Manufacturers that use an integrated documentation authoring package not only enjoy greater accuracy, increased productivity, and more cost savings, but also realize significant ROI within the first year.

By automating the creation of product documentation and related content—and linking it directly to 3D CAD models—manufacturers can improve profit margins, achieve faster times-to-market, and increase sales related to better customer education. A 3D authoring tool empowers you to produce documentation faster and at lower cost, while reducing levels of rework and lowering production overhead. With more effective training and service, your company not only will enhance customer satisfaction, but also will realize shorter maintenance down times and greater profit margins.

To learn more about 3DVIA Composer, visit cati.com or email us at cati@cati.com.

 

*This article provides excerpts from the "Streamlining Product Documentation across the Manufacturing Enterprise with 3DVIA Composer White paper, published by  DS SolidWorks Corp.

 

Streamline Product Documentation With 3DVIA Composer - Part 6

Part 6. Creating vibrant, exciting marketing content and web-based catalogs

Because CAD data enables you to create imagery for print and online marketing purposes with a 3D authoring tool, it is an incredibly valuable asset. Many manufacturers spend millions of dollars annually on professional product photography to present and market their products when a more cost-effective, high-resolution, CAD-derived image could satisfy the same need. Some media, such as television and magazines, always will require live-action video and photography. However, the burgeoning need for digital content and the explosive growth in online, web-based catalogs both demand visual content that manufacturers can best supply by re-purposing product design data.

Even if a manufacturer already derives catalog visuals from CAD files, the process requires the input of both an engineer and a marketing professional to separate engineering data from marketing needs. With an integrated documentation system, marketing professionals can render, modify, and change images to meet specific printing or marketing needs, such as controlling resolution—pixels and dots-per-inch—which is not easy to do with CAD screen captures. Because the CAD model can be used to update views and animations that match the final product, marketing professionals no longer need to wait for Engineering to finish the product to create content.

With CAD-derived imagery and animations, manufacturers can make their online and digital media marketing vehicles more exciting, dynamic, and interactive, while saving money at the same time. With an integrated 3D authoring tool, just about anyone can transform a CAD model into a dazzling interactive animation.

Furthermore, manufacturers can begin marketing the product upon its release for production rather than waiting on initial production runs or photography to begin creating market demand. By re-purposing CAD models as marketing visuals and animations with content creation software, you can reduce photography costs, increase visual flexibility, and get out in front of product introductions.

Check back tomorrow for the concluding Part 7

To learn more about 3DVIA Composer, visit cati.com or email us at cati@cati.com.

 

*This article provides excerpts from the "Streamlining Product Documentation across the Manufacturing Enterprise with 3DVIA Composer White paper, published by  DS SolidWorks Corp.

Streamline Product Documentation With 3DVIA Composer - Part 5

Part 5. Publishing effective training materials

The ongoing development and publication of product training materials—for customers, new employees, and global partners—is another area where the repurposing of CAD design data can pay big dividends for today’s manufacturers. Because the native CAD files serve as the single source for all product content, using a 3D authoring tool to customize training materials for specific groups is far easier and more efficient than crafting these materials independently. This capability is especially useful—you can create effective training materials without using the costly textual translation services once required for communicating with overseas audiences.

With integrated documentation software that can embed 3D content, markups, and animations in any ActiveX-compatible business application, manufacturers have the power to create, manage, and deploy product training documentation on a global scale, at much lower cost. This capability allows you to embed product training content in common communication applications, such as Microsoft® Word, Excel, and PowerPoint®; as a standalone executable for viewing with free player software; or in HTML format to distribute over the web.

Many manufacturers spend millions of dollars annually on professional product photography to present and market their products when a more cost-effective, high-resolution, CAD-derived image could satisfy the same need.

Check back tomorrow for Part 6 of 7 covering "Creating vibrant, exciting marketing content and web-based catalogs."

To learn more about 3DVIA Composer, visit cati.com or email us at cati@cati.com.

 

*This article provides excerpts from the "Streamlining Product Documentation across the Manufacturing Enterprise with 3DVIA Composer White paper, published by  DS SolidWorks Corp.

Streamline Product Documentation With 3DVIA Composer - Part 4

Part 4. Delivering accurate field service, maintenance, and repair information

In a global economy where customers reside in different countries, the ability to provide accurate and universally comprehensible field service, maintenance, and repair documentation is critical.

Providing this type of product documentation has presented greater challenges, added demands on engineering resources that do not carry primary responsibility for its development, and increased operational costs. For example, documenting the intricate details necessary for showing how to dismantle a machine, perform a maintenance service or repair, and reassemble it might require a series of step-by-step graphics from Engineering. Service technicians frequently call in to engineering departments to get this type of information for use in the field. Complicating this challenge even further is the fact that the field-service technician may speak another language, requiring translations of service or repair documentation materials, which adds further costs and also delays product shipment in many industries.

With 3DVIA Composer, manufacturing can replace text-based field service instructions with graphics and video animation, therby improving service operations, minimizing the need for language translations, reducing training needs, and decreasing operational costs.

Check back tomorrow for Part 5 of 7 covering "Publishing effective training materials."

To learn more about 3DVIA Composer, visit cati.com or email us at cati@cati.com.

 

*This article provides excerpts from the "Streamlining Product Documentation across the Manufacturing Enterprise with 3DVIA Composer White paper, published by  DS SolidWorks Corp.

Streamline Product Documentation With 3DVIA Composer - Part 3

Part 3. Creating better user manuals and product documentation

While product documentation can fulfill a range of uses, its core purpose is twofold: to provide customers with the information they need to use and enjoy a manufacturer’s product and to develop customer loyalty for that product. Therefore, the production of user manuals, part lists, and product schematics is an important function for building customer satisfaction and loyalty—one that requires the contributions of illustrators, writers, and publishing specialists. Whether product documentation personnel are engineers or have a limited engineering background, they can substantially increase their chances of success by creating graphical content directly from CAD models.

With a 3D authoring tool like 3DVIA Composer, product documentation specialists can avoid using a CAD system or asking an engineer to produce product information such as exploded views, vector line art images, or annotations.

Instead of re-creating visuals from the finished product, they can create 2D and 3D visuals to meet any documentation requirements. Whether the need is vector line art of an exploded view for technical illustrations or a detailed view of a high-resolution raster image for a user manual, documentation
professionals can save time and improve the visual’s quality by accessing and reusing native CAD data.

Product documentation professionals can save time and improve the quality of documentation visuals by utilizing a 3D authoring tool like 3DVIA Composer to create documentation graphics directly from native CAD data. 

The interactive nature of 3D provides an effective means for showing your customers how to use a product and for illustrating how that product works. Integrated documentation software provides the capabilities for creating interactive content from the actual product CAD file.

Check back tomorrow for Part 4 of 7 covering "Delivering accurate field service, maintenance, and repair information."

To learn more about 3DVIA Composer, visit cati.com or email us at cati@cati.com.

 

*This article provides excerpts from the "Streamlining Product Documentation across the Manufacturing Enterprise with 3DVIA Composer White paper, published by  DS SolidWorks Corp.

Streamline Product Documentation With 3DVIA Composer - Part 1

Today, product developers are gaining competitive advantage, saving time, and cutting costs with a new class of integrated software tools. With 3D authoring software like 3DVIA Composer, your company can use 3D CAD data to automate the product documentation process—without modifying product designs. By addressing the changing nature of CAD data, this associative documentation tool seamlessly and effortlessly keeps your documentation up to date.  This 7 Part series will explain the benefits of streamlining your product documentation across the manufacturing enterprise.

Part 1. Introduction

While 3D CAD has made designers and engineers more productive and efficient, the innate value in the CAD models they create often ends with the delivery of 2D drawings or printed materials to manufacturing. 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.

Product Documentation is often a separate step that currently takes place after product design in many product development processes, creating delays and the need for additional rework.  Shortening this step by using a 3D authoring tool to develop documentation content concurrently can accelerate time-to-market and increase competitiveness.

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.

As the design changes, 3D authoring software 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.

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.

Using a 3D Authoring tool like 3DVIA Composer, Manufacturers can generate CAD data to meet the documentation, assembly, manufacturing, training, service, and marketing content needs, automatically and simultaneously.3DVIA Composer enables you to produce documentation as much as 30% faster than with conventional methods, and realize significant ROI by reducing documentation, training, and localization.

Check back tomorrow for Part 2 of 7 covering "Automating manufacturing and assembly instructions."

To learn more about 3DVIA Composer, visit cati.com or email us  at cati@cati.com.

 

*This article provides excerpts from the "Streamlining Product Documentation across the Manufacturing Enterprise with 3DVIA Composer White paper, published by  DS SolidWorks Corp.