Doug Halliday at Adobe PLM

 

I have just returned from the show in San Diego.   As always, this was a good show.  We had a chance to present some of our thoughts on trends in information sharing and collaboration for processes such as sourcing, new product development, marketing, production manufacturing and others.   We also had the chance to meet with many, many customers who told us stories about how they are.  That is always the best part of these shows.  We get lots of questions and also get a chance to learn how our customers are using our tools.   Read on to find out what we learned about collaboration, document sharing, interoperability and extending engineering data outside.

Thanks SolidWorks World

So, as I said, I just returned from San Diego with lots of customer conversations fresh in mind. Adobe is in position to help manufacturing firms leverage and solidify (pardon the pun) there processes that rely on PLM.  We also had the chance to meet with many, many customers who told us stories about how they are.  That is always the best part of these shows.  We get lots of questions and also get a chance to learn how our customers are using our tools.  

 

So, What Did We Learn?

Visualization Tools

It is always interesting to speak to customers.  One of the frequent questions is how does this compare to (name your favorite 3D visualization tool)?   Well, my answer is that our offerings are quite different.  Is there overlap?  Sure, but that is, to some extent in the visualization space.  First, leveraging the free Adobe Reader with all of its significant ability to manage comment and review sessions, forms data collection, and certainly all of the 3D capability like measurement, sectioning, view creation, etc. are big differences.   I like to explain that combining 2D and 3D content, “containerizing” both precise data as well as tessellated data and enabling viewing of PMI are other differences with engineering-oriented viewers. 

 

Data Sharing and Collaboration

Lots of our customers are having success sharing their engineering data outside of engineering, which is a form of what I call document-based collaboration.  I think saving documents from numerous other file formats is really helping them.  We’re hearing success stories about marketing materials, manufacturing work instructions, field service, supply-chain integration/data sharing and the request for quotation (RFQ) process.  Using digital rights management in conjunction with the PDF format is really gaining momentum with the customers I spoke to… rather than pushing out dead data or trying to have third parties work remotely within various engineering and business systems, Rights Management based revision control and IP protection is really working well.

 

Interoperability

Lastly, we do get lots of questions about “do you support this format or that”?  The answer is almost always yes.  (For a complete list of supported formats, go to http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat3d/supportedformats .) “Do I have to replace my authoring tools… for example for technical documents?”  “No” is the answer.  We’re helping make those investments in systems and tools more valuable. 

Now it’s on to Pacific Design and Manufacturing in Anaheim next week.  Well, it’s cold here in Michigan, so the sunshine will be great.  (Oh yea, I some of Tiger Woods in the Buick Open yesterday… people, 50 degrees is not cold.  17 degrees, outside my window right now is cold.)

See you in CA.

Posted by Doug Halliday at 12:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So I get to escape the cold Midwest weather for a while.  We will be participating in SolidWorks World and Pacific Design and Manufacturing in Souther California during the weeks of January 20 and January 27.  I've included details below.

I also wanted to get out some news and reminders about the Acrobat 3D contest and recent price changes that you should know about.  Read below to see the details...

Some Hot Topics:

• I wanted to write to give you a heads up that as of early this month, Adobe went live with a new price for Acrobat 3D Version 8. As you're aware, the suggested retail price of the product has been US$995. The new suggested retail price is US$699.
• Adobe does ongoing pricing analysis of its products, and based on recent research believes the new price of Acrobat 3D will help make the product accessible to an even larger set of individuals and organizations in the manufacturing and AEC markets.  For more on this subject see http://www.adobe.com/acrobat3d.
• The due date for the Acrobat 3D Contest is almost hear.  January 31 is only three weeks away!  Don’t forget to enter!  It is SO easy to enter. It will really take just a small amount of time to win Acrobat 3D, an iPhone, a Dell laptop, or a 3D mouse. 

Here is what you need to do:

1. CONVERT A MODEL — simply take an existing CAD assembly that you own and use Acrobat 3D Version 8 to convert it to a 3D PDF - it's that simple. You can even use the free 30-Day Acrobat 3D trial version.
2. PICK A CATEGORY — Enter the Collaboration, Visualization, and CAD Data Interoperability or the Technical Publishing category depending on what type of work you wish to showcase.
3. SUBMIT — Deadline for submission is January 31, 2008. Enter Contest.

On the Road Again:

California here we come… a chance to get away from the cold, cold Midwest weather for a couple of weeks.  The Adobe Manufacturing Business Development Team (Jim Merry and me) will be at some events in the coming weeks that you may be interested in.  Here are the details:

• The first is SolidWorks World in San Diego, January 20 through January 23.  I have an opportunity to speak during a breakout session on Monday the 21st.  SolidWorks a good partner company, and many, many customers blend SolidWorks and Acrobat 3D into their workflows… especially to share information outside of engineering and across the supply-chain.  I am looking forward to sharing some success stories and how-to’s

• We will also be at Pacific Design and Manufacturing in Anaheim, January 29-31.  This should be the West Coast’s largest manufacturing show.  Stop by the Adobe booth to learn more about solutions for manufacturing.  We look forward to seeing you there. 

That's all for today.  See you.

Posted by Doug Halliday at 01:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I have been working with many of our customers who have asked about how to get more out of their investment in 3D CAD and PLM.  This is going to be a “how-to” session on doing just that… I would like to show you how to better extend your 3D CAD assets outside of engineering and integrate the product development process across the extended enterprise.

 

Today we will pretend we work at a company called Global Corp. Imagine that you are the engineering lead for a project, and you must communicate technical information to suppliers.   I will show you how repurpose 3D content from virtually any CAD format, making it available cross-functionally, with suppliers and joint venture partners virtually anywhere.  In today’s scenario, I will show you how a technical specification created in an MS Office application can be combined with any 2D or 3D content and shared easily and securely across the enterprise.

I have been working with many of our customers who have asked about how to get more out of their investment in 3D CAD and PLM.

 

Top firms are addressing the issue.  Why?  Here are the top 3 reasons given in a recent Aberdeen study are:

• First, getting work done as soon as possible clearly shortens lead times to market.  There is no waiting for engineering
• Second, addressing things like serviceability and manufacturability earlier and in a much more robust way, dramatically improves quality and customer satisfaction.
• Third, globalization.  3D content greatly enhances understanding and reduces errors.  That runs the gamut from manufacturing work instructions, to service manuals; to user manuals… you name it.

 

Here are the business challenges our customers are facing:

• Most design today is done in 3D but there’s no easy and intuitive way of communicating in 3D
• Often technical documentation has completed only after products are fully designed and engineered, very late in the product development cycle, so…
• 3D designs are converted to 2D renderings, which are very limiting, and add time to the process of getting new products to market

 

Aberdeen says that firms who have done the best job of sharing 3D information downstream are meeting their target an average of 90% of the time, or better.  The laggards are way behind, meeting targets only 55% of the time, on average, or worse.

 

So the reasons are the obvious, better, faster, cheaper.  But how do you avoid the expense and complexity of CAD software to do the job? This is going to be a “how-to” session on doing just that… I will like to show you how to better extend your 3D CAD assets outside of engineering and integrate the product development process across the extended enterprise.

Lets get started...

Today we will pretend we work at a company called Global Corp. Imagine that you are the engineering lead for a project, and you must communicate technical information to suppliers.   I will show you how repurpose 3D content from virtually any CAD format, making it available to suppliers virtually anywhere.  In today’s scenario, the technical specification.  We are going to start in MS Excel. 

 

Figure 1.  Starting to Create the Specifications Document

 

We have added the technical parameters.  We are going to add some 3D content, some views and some buttons to easily direct readers to the views we will create.  We have Acrobat 3D installed, so we can use the Acrobat tools to search for and add the 3D content we need to the document.  Notice in Figure 1, we have selected the SolidWorks disc brake assembly we need.  We don’t even need SolidWorks installed to add the 3D content we need. 

 

Figure 2.  Our Specifications Document with 3D Content Added

 

Once we select “open” the 3D content is added.  We then resize the 3D pane to obtain the result in Figure 2.  At this point, however, we have just a static image. Our next step will be to convert to PDF.  To do that, we simply chose “create PDF” for the Acrobat Toolbar and off we go.  See Figure 3 to view our 3D PDF.

 

Figure 3.  Our 3D Technical Specifications PDF

Now we have real, interactive 3D.  Let’s go create some views to help our customers for this document. The idea is to make using the document really easy for the suppliers we are working with.  In figure 4, we have activated the 3D pane, rotated, panned and zoomed to the 3D design just the way we need it.  In fact, we even isolated just some of the parts. Then we have selected Views -> Manage Views to create named views that the user can easily navigate to...  but we’re not done yet.  Lets add some buttons to make navigation intuitive.

 

Figure 4.  Managing Views

Let’s look at Figure 5 to see the buttons we have added.  I am going to explain the steps I took in this article.  We will explore a little more deeply in a future article.  As a side note, I could have created the buttons and associated the necessary actions in LiveCycle Designer, which ships with Acrobat pro and Acrobat 3D, but for this simple case, Acrobat Forms is all I need, and is a little easier in this case. 

 

Figure 5.  Buttons Added to The Specifications

After creating three views I wanted, so that I can direct the user to specific areas of the design, I added buttons by first going to View -> Toolbars -> Forms Toolbar.  Then I selected the button tool.  Once selected, I simply sized and positioned the buttons where I wanted them.  I added border and fill colors.  I added labels in the Options Tab… for example “Complete Assembly”.  Then I moved to the  Actions Tab (see figure 6).  I selected “Go to a 3D View”, selected the view I wanted when prompted, for all three buttons and I was done.  So now you have it.  We have completed one simple example of extending the use of three dimensional data across the extended enterprze.  You can imagine all of the additional other things we could do, like adding call-outs, adding additional content from whatever file format or source it is saved in and even more 2 or 3D content.  We can make everything available to the receiver, with out worrying about the applications and formats they may have.  Everything will simply open and work in the free Adobe Reader. 

 

Figure 6.  Creating Adding the Action to the Button

Well, we’ll stop here today.  I would ask you to not only consider the ease with which we did this work, but I challenge you to find an easier way, anyway.

Comments are always appreciated, including what you would like to see next. 

Posted by Doug Halliday at 10:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)