We've all spent too many hours trying to figure out the instructions for assembling or operating equipment. The manual is often difficult to understand because it's not easy to describe a complicated product with words. It may be even harder to understand because the text was written in another language and translated by someone who was not completely familiar with the subject matter.

Instruction manuals can be made clearer by including lots of graphics. However, using 3D CAD data to create technical illustrations can be very time-consuming. Preparatory work must often be done by the engineers familiar with the CAD system used to design the product, and the preparation of the graphics and communications with the technical publications team may distract engineers from their actual design work.

German farm equipment manufacturer RAUCH GmbH has improved its technical publications process, while reducing cost, by providing its illustrators with Arbortext IsoDraw.

Now illustrators can create their own graphics based on the Pro/ENGINEER CAD data. The job is much faster because back and forth between engineering and technical publications is eliminated. This makes it possible to use many more graphics and very little text in the manuals, which in turn makes them less expensive to translate.

Technical documentation challenges. RAUCH is a leader in designing and manufacturing machinery that meters and distributes fertilizers and seeding as well as other granules. RAUCH's 280 employees deliver more than 15,000 machines per year, of which 65 percent are exported.

RAUCH's products are designed in Pro/ENGINEER, so 3D models of the products are readily available. The challenge is the requirements of technical illustration are different from engineering. The parts and assemblies need to be put into their proper isometric orientation which requires rotation, translation, exploding, and other graphical operations.

"Often this work needs to be repeated multiple times on the same part because the part will need to be shown in more than one position," says Alexander Loerch, technical documentation specialist at Rauch. "Creating graphics for describing complex work steps in an assembly instruction often requires drawing new parts from scratch."

In the past, design engineers had to be involved because they were the ones familiar with the CAD system. But the technical documentation staff also needed to be closely involved in order to define the views that are needed. The need for extensive communications multiplied the time requirements for all of the parties involved.

Rauch managers searched for a solution that would reduce the time required to produce technical illustrations and enable the technical publications staff to produce the illustrations without the involvement of the engineering department.

Arbortext IsoDraw helps produce illustrations faster. Now technical illustrators access the Pro/ENGINEER models from within Arbortext IsoDraw. With a single mouse click, they remove hidden lines and convert the 3D drawing to a technical illustration. They can easily rotate graphics and put them into the right perspective. They can incorporate additional elements such as hands and arrows to show in which order to do various steps, in which direction to rotate a screw, to instruct the reader to press a switch, and so forth. They can produce cutaways to show important parts in a machine and how and where they need to be positioned.

"The illustrators use the callout tool in Arbortext IsoDraw to produce an introductory illustration where all of the important parts in a machine are listed and shown," Loerch says. "The callout tools save time by providing shadows for the lines and renumbering the items automatically when a callout is deleted or added."

Loerch has created a large number of standard parts models that are contained in various RAUCH products. He frequently saves time by accessing these parts for use in the current manual.

Ninety percent reduction in translation costs. Now that Rauch is finding it easier to create graphics, it's also finding cost savings with regard to translation. Old manuals had a lot of text and ran up to 36 pages. The new assembly manuals consist of between two and 24 pages of graphics. The only text is general security advice.

"This new approach has also reduced translation costs by 90 percent," Loerch says. "And we can produce graphics much more quickly now. The time that we save is being reinvested in improving the quality of the manuals."

RAUCH is currently in the process of producing manuals for the AXEO salt and sand spreader. The operating manual and one of the assembly manuals have been completed using Arbortext IsoDraw, and up to ten more manuals are in the planning stages.