RapidAuthor for Teamcenter

Products cannot be delivered without documentation. Waiting until products are completely designed to develop the necessary technical publications is no longer an option. Starting documentation deliverables early in product development can help with the schedule, but when product changes occur, the changes must be cascaded through all the impacted documentation. Additionally, you do not want to slow down the engineering effort by making a lot of requests for illustrations and other source input for documentation.

Teamcenter® software helps keep product launches on schedule and documentation on budget by bringing technical publication activities into the product lifecycle management (PLM) environment so authoring can occur alongside product development. With direct access to product source material such as CAD files, bills-of-material (BOMs) and other data, authors can start to create content for publications. But rather than cut-and-paste – or worse, re-enter data – Teamcenter can be used to work in unison with RapidAuthor to further reduce the time and effort technical publication authors expend to create product documentation.

RapidAuthor is composed of several bundled tools that utilize the same user interaction model to achieve the authoring and publishing of technical communications. Each tool comes with wizards that automate major portions of the authoring process to translate data from product source material to technical document content. With a single application, technical publication authors can create text, 2D/3D illustrations and animation components. All authoring tools use the product structure and JT™ data format source material in Teamcenter to create this document content.

Teamcenter can be used to link these content components to that source material so that the impact of product change on technical publications can be determined and they can be updated quickly and accurately.

RapidAuthor is composed of the following powerful tools:

The work instruction component is a tool for fast and easy production of digital interactive work instructions, job cards and assembly instructions for internal users and your external customers. Instruction authors can quickly and easily create 3D animations, working from Teamcenter manufacturing source data or product structures. This ensures assembly workers on your manufacturing shop floor or technicians and dealers in the field know what to do and how to do it.

The technical manual component speeds up product documentation authoring by re-using existing CAD and PLM XML content to create 2D illustrations, 3D animations and text to clearly communicate complex mechanical procedures that results in better product manuals in a fraction of the time. 3D manuals emphasize visual knowledge transfer rather than reading comprehension, minimizing translation issues and improving information retention.

The catalog component is used to produce digital, interactive illustrated parts catalogs that use unique 3D explosions to illustrate complex mechanical assemblies. Content is created from your product structures, and can be generated to take advantage of your existing effectivity, options and variants and other product configuration information already available in Teamcenter. The result is an interactive 3D environment with drill-down navigation that improves the end-user experience and reduces ordering and purchasing errors.

2D and 3D catalog generation Teamcenter and RapidAuthor permit authors to generate spare parts catalogs directly from product design data using product BOMs, CAD geometry and part metadata for much of the content of part tables and illustrations. The author simply needs to determine the page hierarchy of the catalog, exploded views, viewpoints, etc., to arrive at a publishable catalog. Catalog content is updated based on configuration data such as product revision effectivity, part applicability and interchangeability. This automation greatly reduces the amount of time and effort to generate product, task and customer-specific catalogs to improve usability and reduce part ordering mistakes.

RapidAuthor enables authors to generate text, illustrations and animations for work instructions used in both manufacturing and service domains. By using CAD models or JT, authors can create explosions for 2D illustration or 3D animations of assemblies for use in assembly or disassembly instructions for service. Once the original procedure is created, the author makes a simple menu pick, and RapidAuthor will generate the paired assembly or disassembly content and illustrations/animations. In the published electronic content, process steps are highlighted as the user selects parts and vice versa.