You pull up to the drive-through to order your coffee: “Medium Coffee, nix the cream and sugar.” The dangers of poor communication will soon be clear. Whether you are designing and manufacturing products or ordering coffee in the drive-through, if your intentions are misunderstood, the results can be disastrous. You take that first sip and realize you got EXTRA cream and sugar.
With product manufacturers looking to cut costs and save time, the victims of the communication gap are not just you, but your co-workers, your company, and your customers. And the result of this gap isn’t just a just a bad cup of coffee, but wasted time, lost hours, delayed design cycles, poorly assembled and lower quality products, lost customers, and lower margins. Historically, manufacturers have simply had to accept this communication gap.
In a past Webinar, we’ve talked about making the pieces more efficiently: “Creating Manufacturing Process Sheets and Quality Control Documents”. With this new entry in our ongoing Manufacturing series, we’ll close the gap on the communication needed to make the pieces go together quickly and correctly.
In a typical manufacturing workflow, requests for CAD-related images are numerous. Meeting these requests requires costly engineering time and can delay the arrival of deliverables required to bring products to market. Further compounding this problem is the fact that product communications each serve unique purposes, and graphics used to support them must be developed individually to be effective. This process alone is time consuming, but becomes an ever greater challenge whenever designs change and supporting product communications must be remade
Leveraging CAD data to satisfy manufacturing requirements holds great potential for improving technical product communications. The potential benefits are numerous and can have a significant impact on the bottom line. Engineers can be freed from the taxing responsibility of generating product screen captures or exploded views and product documentation can be updated automatically with the latest design change.
Right now, some of the most common problems in documenting the assembly process:
- Delayed delivery because Assembly Instructions aren’t finished
- Engineering waits for the first production and then take pictures of people putting it together to create Assembly Instructions, Repair Manuals, or Product Literature
- Design cycles go up and productions are delayed
- Engineering is going back and forth with Manufacturing, printing screenshots of the CAD models, documenting each step and then redoing that work every time the design changes
- Product quality suffers, field failures increase, and customer satisfaction drops
- Some companies try to make do with the manufacturing drawings as an assembly guide – they can see how to make it but it doesn’t always help with how it goes together
In our upcoming Webinar, we will talk about how one local company came to CAPINC because they were seeing far too many field failures. And these failures were causing a strain on the business relationship with one of their largest clients. Motors and control mechanisms were failing and our customer traced the problem back to incorrectly assembled components. But why?
- Assembly instructions were unclear
- Some instructions were never updated after a design change
- There was high turnover in manufacturing requiring frequent retraining
- Language barriers made training and following word-heavy instructions difficult
And this was happening despite the fact engineers were already spending so much time taking pictures, capturing screenshots, creating exploded views, detailing Bills of Material, aligning balloons, calling out dimension, and typing up descriptions to try to make their design intent clear. Redoing this work with every design change meant they weren’t doing their primary job: designing amazing products.
Register for the Webinar below and we will show you how we helped them leverage their 3D CAD models. With just a small change to the way they were already working, they were able to output clear, precise, informative images that could be updated automatically any time a design change happened. And aside from benefits resulting from the fast, easy and accurate documentation, they also recognized a significant saving in time.
Grab your lunch, sit back and see what is possible.
