Technical Publications – A Major Time & Cost Saver!
When we start thinking about the manufacturing process we think about prototypes, production tooling, lead times, material costs, customer requirements just to name a few product development road bumps. What many if not most manufacturers overlook when improving processes are manuals and assembly instructions. For Solid Edge users, Technical Publications or for short “Tech Pubs” is a major time and cost saver.
Let’s start with “what is Tech Pubs”? Tech Pubs is an added tool that works right within Solid Edge that helps streamline the documentation process with time-saving features for rapidly creating and updating documents. Users find real benefit in using this tool primarily when creating manuals for their end-use products, updating online product catalogs, sending assembly instructions to other internal departments, or for marketing/promotion purposes. Tech Pubs, in a nutshell, is a communication tool that is tied directly back to the model or assembly that a designer is working on. Another nice feature in Tech Pubs is no matter how robust the model, everything can be exported out into industry-standard 3D PDFs and web-based HTML. Again, because Tech Pubs are seamlessly integrated within your Solid Edge software, you are work directly with your Solid Edge parts and assemblies and eliminate the need to convert computer-aided design (CAD) files.
Where is the real value of implementing Tech Pubs into a workflow? First, there are the benefits of documenting technical changes early in the design process, it might be important to be able to accurately reference previous ideas and designs. Also, and probably the biggest initial upfront cost saver is eliminating the need for specialized technical authors or 3rd party services. If your team can easily create their documentation and it all ties into Solid Edge, you don’t have to export data, don’t have to have someone edit and clean it up, and get it all done a lot faster. Last, for companies that have an online product catalog, there is real value in having a tool that makes automatic changes to the online products automatically when the designer makes an update. This way there is a big reduction in documentation errors.
Technical Publication is a tool that we here at CAM Logic are seeing a lot of growth within our Solid Edge customer base
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