In this article you will learn what Creo Illustrate can do for you, and exactly what value it brings to the table.
You will also discover how Creo Illustrate addresses many issues faced by OEMs and engineering organizations.
In order to fully grasp what Creo Illustrate can do for you, you must understand the current market situation.
Regardless of your industry, the current market is complex.
Here are some of the reasons why.
Customer demands are continually increasing, and manufacturers have responded by delivering more complex products.
For example, customers demand configurable products. These same customers are also demanding higher product performance, increased uptime, and low total cost of ownership.
In addition to customer demands, we are also dealing with younger generations.
These young generations commonly resort to graphical illustrations or channels such as YouTube for guidance on how to do things. Because of these new tendencies, companies must adapt the ways they produce information according to the needs of the young generation.
Aside from the complexities of increased demands and young generations, organizations strive to capture global markets.
To capture global markets, organizations need to translate much of the documentation and product information that gets shipped.
Lastly, to remain competitive organizations must reduce time to market.
Altogether, this market situation creates significant pressure.
Organizations must make products that are more deliverable, improve customer experience, reduce cost, all while improving overall time to market.
How Creo Illustrate addresses the complex market situation.
1. Creo Illustrate helps deliver more configurable products
Leveraging Creo Illustrate and some other tools you can you can produce accurate configuration specific illustrations.
This provides product-specific product information to end user and consumers as well as highly skilled field technicians.
2. Creo Illustrate helps improve customer satisfaction
In order to improve customer satisfaction, you must enhance the overall customer experience.
By using Creo Illustrate you can create interactive graphical information that is easy to understand and interpret regardless of the native language.
3. Creo Illustrate helps lower costs
Lowering costs is an essential part of a competitive business.
Using Creo Illustrate you can leverage the CAD data you’ve already produced for downstream deliverables; work instructions, manuals, etc. This helps reduce redundant illustration and tracing effort, and keeps your technical communications up to date – event if documentation is created in parallel with the engineering and design process.
4. Creo Illustrate helps reduce time to market
Creo Illustrate helps streamline the process of creating illustrations and animations of your products. It eliminates the need to interrupt Engineering to gather screenshots of products and then laboriously trace images to create thin/thick illustrations. This allows you to accelerate the end-to-end creation, management, and publishing of dynamic technical information.
PTC’s Service Information Manager adds three advanced capabilities to the XML authoring and content management system:
- Translation Management
- Part List Generation
- Publication Structures
My last blog focused on Publication Structures. You can read more about publication structures here: Revolutionizing Book Assembly with SIM. Next time I will discuss Translation Management. However, today I’m discussing Part List Generation, how to create value from part data.
The Engineering Bill of Material (BoM) is structured based on the design. The Service BoM is then derived from the Engineering BoM. With the part structure defined, you can visually identify parts and add them to various service kits and assemblies and ultimately generate a part list from the structure that can be used in technical publications. Updates from source parts and drawings to downstream processes are practically automatic. Building part lists with associative, up-to-date service information increases the accuracy of information and improves authoring efficiency thereby reducing time to market.
Each component in a drawing can be a part with its own lifecycle that is managed and repurposed in an integrated system. All too often we see disparate systems with Engineering drawings in one system and part data management in another.
Many users of Windchill use it as a CAD warehouse to store content more or less. Sure users of the design engineering tools find them extremely valuable, many folks are leveraging workflow processes and lifecycle features to expedite the day-to-day flow of information, and many have found that the change management tools add value when it comes to maintaining change integrity and traceability. Nonetheless, many organizations are not leveraging their parametric data for parts management (you know who you are).
The ability to repurpose Engineering design part structures to create Part Lists for Service information is the promise land. But the system can only repurpose parts if they exist as parts in the system. Generating part lists for catalogs and online delivery requires parts with end items and part structures. So in other words, using Windchill Service Parts and Service Information Manager requires part data management in Windchill PDMLink.
Service parts management provides an out-of-the-box method of generating Part Lists for the technical documentation community from a single source of information. As a result, organizations are able to greatly improve the process of information delivery and are able to leverage dynamic publishing capabilities to bring products to market faster, and keep customers better informed.
Learn More
Refer to PTC’s web site for a complete description of Service Information Manager.
EAC information solution experts have decades of reliable XML solution experience. Explore the EAC website to learn more about our products and services or review the Product Development Information Services Brochure.
One challenge when working with technical information is that publications can be very large. Several hundred pages is not unusual and in some cases over a thousand pages are necessary to describe complex service procedures and part catalogs.
Authoring and assembling large books can be a painful process as the sheer size can be taxing to software. XML, DITA, and managing content objects do ease the pain, it is what industrial strength publishing software is designed to do. However, there is only so much information the average workstation can process.
Many creative solutions have been implemented to meet unique business requirements for book assembly. The business requirements and data sources vary from company to company, such as selecting lessons individually to create a complete custom course; or selecting individual part list and image pairs to create a complete part catalog. As an application expert, I have personally coded many custom solutions to support cobbling books together over the years and I know that many other equally creative solutions exist.
PTC’s Service Information Manager adds three advanced capabilities to the XML authoring and content management system:
- Translation Management
- Part List Generation
- Publication Structures
Publication Structures are the least sexy of the three and the one that truly revolutionizes the book assembly process. Publication Structures are used to assemble information objects that are to be published. Essentially each Publication Structure represents a book. You can add a table of contents, a parts list, or any other XML content object or images to the book right in the Windchill SIM web browser user interface.
Without Publication Structures, books are typically assembled manually in Arbortext Editor. Someone would still have to assemble the book manually in a Publication Structure, but the user experience is very different. To get a sense of this, in Arbortext Editor, if a writer wants to move a chapter to a different location, they would edit the document, select content, cut it, move to the new location, and then paste. In a Publication Structure, the user can drag and drop chapter or section objects in the structure without ever opening the book to edit it.
Publication Structures provide an out-of-the-box method of assembling publications for the technical documentation community without customizing. As a result, organizations are able to greatly improve the process of information delivery and are able to leverage dynamic publishing capabilities to bring products to market faster, and keep customers better informed.
Learn More
Refer to PTC’s web site for a complete description of Service Information Manager.
EAC information solution experts have decades of reliable XML solution experience. Explore the EAC website to learn more about our products and services or review the Product Development Information Services Brochure.
For almost 20 years the staff of EAC Product Development Solutions has believed there is a better way to develop products. The “traditional” processes are fundamentally broken and the symptoms of these fractures are a painful reality for many of our customers. Among others, they face missed deadlines, failed product launches, and are unable to effectively manage resources. There’s a better way.
We believe that product development is a continuous system; not a single-track process with a defined start and finish. It extends beyond the engineering department and engages everyone within a company. Because of its breadth, it needs continual support. It begins with the alignment of business objectives and initiatives. Once an entire organization understands the goals for the future they can agree upon a plan for success and focus on putting the right people, processes, and tools in place to meet their goals, drive innovation, and increase productivity.
Each part of the product development system has distinct needs. People in Management, Marketing, Engineering, Manufacturing, Procurement, and Support all have different needs and expectations throughout the product life cycle. We offer a wide variety of tools and services to meet the needs of the entire organization.
– Software tools for design, data management, and publishing
– Training and Education Services
– Implementation and Support Services
– Dynamic Publishing Support and Implementation Services
– Engineering and Design Services
– Process Consulting (Lean Product Development Services)
– Product Development System Assessments
The culture at EAC Product Development Solutions revolves around our customers and clients doing things better. We work very hard to be the best product development solutions provider in the world. We strive to do what’s right during every engagement and maintain transparency with our customers. We work diligently to find areas where our company and our clients can work smarter to become more productive and profitable. Most importantly we understand that we work with people. Human beings that need to live, laugh, and enjoy work.
Know that when someone works with EAC they’re working with the best. The best teams, with the best people, focused on the best processes and technologies. We believe there is a better way to develop products and it starts with EAC Product Development Solutions.
EAC Product Development Solutions (EAC), a leading provider of product development technology and services, is pleased to announce the acquisition of the Arbortext Business Unit of TerraXML. This acquisition makes EAC unique in providing a complete end-to-end systematized solution set for managing product information, executing processes within that system, and publishing relevant information both inside and outside the enterprise.
Burnsville, MN, March 19, 2014 — EAC 
Product Development Solutions (EAC) expands capabilities and services through the acquisition of TerraXML’s Arbortext Business Unit. This acquisition aligns EAC with industry trends toward Service Information Management (SIM), Service Lifecycle Management (SLM), and automated publishing of technical information. The Arbortext Business Unit will operate as the EAC Product Development Information Services group or PDIS, and provide implementation, customization, development, and support for the Arbortext product line.
Thane Hathaway, President and CEO of EAC said: “Small and medium businesses (SMB’s) need to manage and publish accurate product information in real time, across multiple platforms just like the Fortune 500’s, but they’ve never had a world class and affordable solution. With this acquisition, we’ve gained the unique ability to implement and support an end-to-end PLM and publishing system specifically tailored for SMB. We look forward to satisfying this market need while continuing to grow and develop these tools.”
Cory Huey, Vice President of Services at EAC said: “This acquisition opens the doors to many new possibilities. In the future, we will develop integrated dynamic publishing products that small companies can more easily afford and deploy. I’m excited to see where the market takes us from here.”
Acquiring the Arbortext Business Unit of TerraXML enables EAC to enter new markets and provide end-to-end solutions to the product development and manufacturing industries. Arbortext allows product companies to easily create products and technical publications and make that information available to customers, dealers, and service staff.
