a realistic claim?

Well, Yes! – we have customers who are achieving these reductions, and better. How are they doing this? Well first we need to consider the problem! So how did they produce shop floor instructions before being able to make these savings? In a very “Traditional” way.

They had spent a lot of money over the years in implementing CAD (and CAM!) but this information was only accessible by a few people who had been trained in how to use the CAD tool.

The people who needed to produce the shop floor documentation had another problem; they needed to start their job when the prototypes had been developed, along with special tooling and so on. The only way they could produce their documentation was to be able to information from a number of sources – mainly digital photographs showing the various steps required to assemble, disassemble and maintain the machine the designers had designed. This would often take a couple of engineers 4 or so days to complete: one taking pictures, and making notes, whilst the other stripped down the machine.

After this had been done, it then needed to be transferred to word processed documents, adding any notes and explanatory symbols, warnings and so on.

Any changes the designers made required changes to the prototype, new photographs and so on… A frustrating process which takes a long time!

So how did they solve it? Using the 3Dvia composer from Dassault Systèmes allowed one engineer to start working in parallel with the designers, so that as they were finishing off their design, the assembly, maintenance and work instructions were started.

Rather than have to use a complex CAD tool, 3DVia composer allowed the engineer to use the native CAD Data, but manipulate it in a simple way, being able to produce different views of the machine, adding notes, labels, sections and everything else that people needed to produce or maintain the machine, as well as showing how special tools should be used before they had to be produced.

The result? Documentation was produced quicker – still providing input to the existing templates, but also providing animations which could be used on any PC, and reduced the volume of instructions required. In addition, because the process was started so much sooner, it was completed sooner: reducing the lag from the finish of the design to the product being sold and maintained in the field.

So how much time did our customer save? The process was reduced from 8 man days to 1 man day.

Contact Invenio to find out mow much time you could save!

3DVia Composer is a revolutionary technology that allows the creation of dynamic electronic work instructions using 3D CAD data. For more information on 3DVia and to discuss your requirements please contact us.