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Produce Technical Documentation that is as Advanced as Your Products

Windchill®-Arbortext® integration enables you to manage all product information, including product designs, manufacturing instructions, support information, and technical documentation, with a single integral system

Ineffective publications destroy customer satisfaction, and poor internal publication processes waste time and effort while creating competitive, legal and regulatory vulnerabilities. Yet, with the combination of Arbortext and Windchill, these problems are virtually eliminated.

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The Current Customer Environment:

The expectations placed on today's product and service companies continue to increase: customer demands for greater innovation and higher quality goods must be balanced against the need to get to market faster, yet with lower cost. Product documentation, such as installation manuals, service manuals, parts lists, owner's and operator's manuals, bulletins and training manuals, is expected to be concise, accurate, tailored to the target audience, and presented appropriately to complete the specific task. The ability of companies to react to and embrace these demands directly affects their competitiveness and financial success.

The Problem:

No product is ever complete without accompanying documentation. In most cases, products cannot be delivered without appropriate technical documentation. Furthermore, documentation quality directly influences the success of the product: poor technical publications reduce customer satisfaction and increase product support costs and legal exposure. Inefficient technical publishing processes slow time-to-market, lower productivity, and increase documentation development and translation costs. Most successful companies have achieved a high degree of automation of their product development and manufacturing process.

Designs are made up of assemblies of components, authored by numerous individuals. When designs, product versions, or configurations change, all related deliverables (e.g., drawings, tool paths) are automatically updated.

The technical publications process, however, has not achieved this same level of maturity. Generally, it is characterized by manual/disconnected hand-offs of information, high degrees of repetitive, low-value work, and overly expensive translation costs. Until recently, there was no way to automatically capture the information created during the product development process and use it to automatically create, configure, publish, or update product-specific documentation that is tailored to the specific needs of each audience and published to all appropriate media, both print and electronic.

Moreover, most technical publications are created as one large file with both text and graphics, which can only be worked on by one person at a time. Information that applies to multiple documents is either rewritten from scratch or copied and pasted, which creates redundant copies of the same or similar information. Every document is manually formatted and laid out for publishing. Since technical publications have a long shelf life and often have to be updated to incorporate changes to product designs or configurations, changes require searching for and updating each instance of the same information and then manually reformatting all affected documents.

Because of this process, many manufacturers delay documentation until the physical product design is stable, which puts the technical publications process on the critical path for getting products to market. Manufacturers often find that they have their products ready, yet cannot ship due to a lack of supporting documentation, which results in lost or delayed revenue and competitive vulnerability. Moreover, a sluggish publications process reduces a company's ability to respond to new market opportunities.

The Solution:

The integration between Windchill and Arbortext advances PTC's vision for its Product Development System (PDS) by allowing companies to optimize their technical publications process. The PTC PDS is designed to deliver the right set of capabilities on an integral architecture that supports the global nature of product development, including the technical publications process. PTC's technical publishing solution aligns the documentation process with product development for unmatched process automation.

With the PDS, documents are created in small, reusable components that can be reused in multiple documents and assembled in different combinations for multiple types of documents and audiences. Authors can incorporate information from other documents and databases while maintaining the connection to the original source of information: if the original source changes, the document automatically updates as well. Authors can embed in their documents interactive 2D and 3D technical illustrations and animations created from their CAD product designs. A link to the original CAD file ensures that the illustration or animation is automatically updated if the design changes. PTC's solution automatically publishes tailored, audiencespecific documents in multiple languages, multiple formats, and multiple types of media, including Web, print, and CD.

Specifically for technical publications, the PTC Product Development System enables companies to:

• create content using a component-based approach
• collaborate within and across organizational boundaries
• control and manage content configurations and related processes, and
• communicate relevant information to a wide variety of audiences

This integration provides a significant opportunity to improve both the quality of technical publications and the process by which they are developed. The PTC PDS eliminates the waste, rework and redundant effort that burden traditional desktop publishing processes. Most importantly, PTC solutions maximize the quality, accuracy, and richness of technical information, thereby increasing customer satisfaction.

Key Capabilities:

• The connection between Arbortext and Windchill enables Arbortext-authored documents to be managed by Windchill
• Arbortext-authored documents are "burst" into document components within Windchill to enable configuration/version and lifecycle management (check in, check out, revise, and promote) at both the component and document assembly level
• Content authors can browse and search document components managed in Windchill to maximize reuse, thus reducing authoring time, increasing quality, and improving time-to-market
• Collaborative document authoring and project management enables multiple authors to work simultaneously on different components of the same document
• Authors can incorporate interactive 2D and 3D technical illustrations and animations into documents through Arbortext's integrated abilities to support the creation of both text and graphics
• Workflow-driven process automation speeds document review and approval, optimizes change management, and triggers the Arbortext Publishing Engine to deliver audience-specific publications in the appropriate format
• Supports the review and markup of Arbortext PDF publications using the optional PTC ProductView™ software

Key Benefits:

• Higher quality, more relevant content improves customer satisfaction and market acceptance
• Timely and accurate documentation and regulatory submissions improve compliance and reduce legal liability and risk
• Ability to ship a complete product, including documentation–faster and simultaneously in multiple languages–speeds market entry, improves market share, and accelerates revenue recognition
• A single repository for all product content enables automation of the product development process, which improves time-tomarket, increases quality, and lowers development costs
• Improved internal service productivity enables greater capacity, resulting in a better customer experience
• Improved ability to reuse data and enhanced accuracy of publications reduces time spent on low-value tasks and rework
• Multi-layer version control and configuration management enables companies to simultaneously manage overlapping documentation release cycles
• Having a single solution provider that tests each application component rigorously on its own, and in the context of the system, means less down time, greater productivity, lower IT burden, and lower total cost of ownership

Please click on the links to the right for more information or request a quote today!