Al-jon, a best-in-class manufacturer of scrap processing and solid waste equipment, uses Autodesk Inventor to design new products. Inventor has allowed Al-jon to enjoy a significant improvement in engineering efficiency, resulting in an increase in the complexity and number of products ready for downstream documentation. In past documentation efforts, Al-jon was able to maintain a process of tedious translations between CAD formats, excel databases and high-resolution images. Various authoring tools were required to translate, illustrate, tabulate data, document and finally publish. Today, however, the pace of engineering has shifted the time-to-market bottleneck downstream to the documentation effort.
The aggressive delivery schedule of a recent product, prompted Al-jon to consider alternatives. The manual for this product was estimated to be 300 pages and was due in 3 months. Kelly is responsible for the delivery of the parts manual. By implementing QuadriSpace, the tedious multi-step, multi-program process was simplified to a single program. A typical section of the manual used to take 3 people 3 days to complete, now Al-jon can accomplish the same effort in 6 hours with only 2 documenters, an 83% efficiency improvement.
Kelly sums it up, “By using QuadriSpace, we are able to quick turn our product manuals and meet the aggressive deadlines required to stay competitive. The overall documentation effort will be completed at least 25% sooner.”