Have you ever stopped and wondered about all the different ways that your CAD data is being used throughout your organization? There are many reasons why this is an important question. Looking for answers could yield some interesting results and empower you with valuable knowledge about your organization. If you are not sure how to begin your quest, start by asking yourself these questions:
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Is your CAD data being used strictly for product development purposes or are there other groups such as marketing who use it?
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Do the service manuals and manufacturing documents in your organization reuse your original CAD data for their technical illustrations or are these illustrations being completely redrawn by someone else?
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Have you used your CAD data to create 3D animations of assembly instructions for your product?
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Are you using 3D animations of your product to enhance your business proposals and to communicate ideas to your customers?
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Do your product catalogues contain CAD data?
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Are you already sending CAD files to some of your customers?
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Are there potential customers who would like to see 3D images of your products on your website?
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Finally, is your marketing team benefiting from CAD based renderings of your products?
These questions show us that CAD data isn’t just for product development. Certainly, product development teams everywhere benefit from using CAD data, but did you know that sharing and reusing CAD data particularly 3D data can be of great benefit to an entire organization? A good example is technical illustrations of products. Technical illustrations are used in product documentation such as service manuals and assembly instructions. Many times these illustrations are hand drawn or completely redrawn using software like Adobe Illustrator. But why redraw everything when you have already have CAD models of your product readily available? Think of the time your organization could save if you somehow reused your CAD models when creating technical illustrations. Especially when you consider that nowadays you can link your CAD files to technical illustration files in such a way that if there is a change in the CAD design data the technical illustration will update automatically. Compare this to a hand drawn technical illustration that would need to be completely redrawn if there is a change in the CAD design data.
Below is an example of a high quality technical illustration that was created with documentation software that reuses the original CAD data. Note that reusing the CAD data allowed us to create this technical illustration very quickly in approximately a couple of minutes. Consider that redrawing this technical illustration would have taken a couple hours to complete.
Here is another interesting fact: a customer once told us that they now have more computers in their plant floor than in their office. While this might be surprising to some, the truth is that computers have become indispensable in the plant floor. In fact, computers have given production teams access to e-mail, MRP software, and even electronic product documentation. Interestingly enough, this same customer told us that there is an ever-growing demand by production teams to see product documentation in lightweight electronic 3D formats that include animations, such as: eDrawings or 3D PDF.
Click here for a 3D PDF document that was created using the original CAD data. Try clicking the different views and then rotate the model. Now imagine your production team using documents like this one in addition to paper copies, or even some day replacing paper copies altogether. Below is an example of an animation of a car owner’s manual, yet another way of leveraging CAD data.
click here for “car owner’s manual” animation
In conclusion, your company’s CAD data can be reused to reduce the time it takes to create product documentation and at the same time enhance the quality of your production documents. Your company has probably made significant investments in time and money on software, hardware and designers to create your CAD data. It only makes sense to get the most value from it and to discover the hidden potential that your CAD data has to offer. For more information please contact us here.
- by Joseph Vera