Lattice Technology Blog

The Need for Better Product & Technical Communications

The MAN Commercial Vehicles Group realized there had to be a better way to communicate with internal stakeholders and their supply chain when it came to part geometry and related information. Like most companies who design complex products, they are using 3D CAD. The problem was that the 3D models were “locked” away in engineering. There was a barrier…a fence around the engineering data. How could they effectively share these complex models with any stakeholder, inside and outside of their company, including with non-engineers?

The Solution - XVL and Lattice3D

The solution that MAN discovered was XVL and Lattice Technology. Lattice Technology repurposes the 3D CAD data from all the major CAD companies. Within the Lattice3D environment, additional information can be authored. And best of all, the 3D model and information can be shared and consumed for free. The sharing is similar to how documents are shared as a PDF. Just as the Adobe PDF reader is free, so is the Lattice3D Player - free as a download from the Lattice3D website.

Casio uses Lattice's technology to create customer manuals 50-60% faster than ever before. In addition, Casio's manuals are now more accurate and easier for the consumer to read.

"Explaining how to use our products properly is extremely important to us. Products, such as the latest digital cameras, can be a bit complex for people. So user manuals need to be easy to understand, accurate and up-to-date. The 3D CAD/CAM data files that we need to develop technical illustrations are huge, require a lot of training to manipulate, and are difficult to transfer to paper easily. Keeping the material updated, and therefore accurate, presents even more of a challenge," explained Casio.

Toyota’s Goal

In January 2013, Beth Stackpole of Desktop Engineering published an article on how to view 3D models and work instructions in Microsoft Excel using Lattice3D Reporter version 6.0.

Since then, there have been more updates (we are now on version 7.1) to the product that have included some very powerful features. The most significant feature added in version 7.1 is the ability to create an interactive 3D PDF directly from Microsoft Excel, read more about it in this post.

This blog post is about considerations for how to speed the completion of the “complete product” by enabling concurrent processes downstream from engineering—namely documentation. A previous blog post regarding how Honda uses Lattice Technology solutions is referenced.

I recently came across the following post that I thought might be useful for people thinking about introducing assembly/manufacturing work instructions to their organizations or refining how work instructions are currently used. The author makes some excellent points. His point about keeping in mind the intended audience of the work instruction is particularly interesting.

One of the favorite parts of my job is visiting our customers and finding out how we have helped them, or better still, finding out what we can do to help them even more.

Announces Lattice3D Studio Version 13.1.

This latest release of the company’s authoring tool contains features that speed time to market and decrease development costs for companies that develop and manufacture complex products.

“The new features in this release continue our effort to enable the enterprise to leverage 3D engineering data to downstream processes and compact product release cycles,” explained Bill Barnes, General Manager, Lattice Technology, Inc.  “For instance, using Lattice3D Studio version 13.1, companies can now create electrical routing for complete product representation. This allows both electrical and mechanical data to be used in interactive work instructions, technical illustrations and any other technical documentation.  Additional features better enable different team members to work concurrently.”