We have just entrusted the b.e. (so me) with the heavy workload on the Instructions for Use that are delivered with our products.
We (SOFRACA) are a small manufacturer (under 15 people) of a multitude of products from different ranges concerning small restaurants, snack bars, and fairgrounds.
The situation I am recovering is several dozen individual user manuals (Word format) to be corrected and reformatted, according to the evolution of the regulatory texts imposed by the standards of our profession.
The user manuals are made up of redundant paragraphs, sometimes with a few variations in syntax, with character formats to be respected, etc., and opening each document regularly and individually to sometimes make the same modification is a tedious task.
Do you know of a CAD "Instructions for use"?
By this I mean, a software, an application allowing you to design documents combining text and graphics, to manage a database of paragraphs and texts, with, if possible, an interactive model in layout (remains active on the generated files).
Also, I don't have the same number of standard paragraphs, it may be that I have a greater diversity of "Installation" paragraphs because it is more specific, than "precautionary use" paragraphs more common to several devices.
How does the documentation department of your companies work?
Thank you very much for the help you could give me in my search.
SolidWorks composer is very well made and very useful, especially if there are changes in the 3D regularly (to justify its cost).
We use Word with templates for each type of machine, which allows us to have all the standards already included, which limits the work.
Then we can imagine using mail merge to directly fill Word files from data from the design (SolidWorks, PDM for example) or thanks to the ERP that we will have automatically exported to Excel!
It's a bit tedious to set up and you shouldn't be afraid to get your hands dirty, but what a joy afterwards!
I had rather distanced 3D via composer, because it was essentially presented to me as a tool to manage graphics, indeed for assembly instructions.
However, the standards require that the instructions for use contain textual regulatory information, so the graphic part is really in the minority compared to the text.
By consulting this last user manual which has just been validated by the LCIE, do you confirm that 3d via or Solidworks composer are indeed appropriate applications for this work?
There is no 3D view in your doc but all the dimensions can be controlled by the design directly and evolve with the 3D! once the base is done, then it rolls!
If you use SolidWorks (and other 3D software? But in this case, the interest is less I think) and you want to put 3D views, which will be later modified, we can consider using SolidWorks Composer because updating the record views is very simple.
For me, this is one of the only advantages: otherwise, the return on investment will be really low!
Why is Word not suitable? What are the disadvantages and disadvantages for you?
For this type of manual, I don't see any advantage in SolidWorks Composer over Word.
As I noted above:
"Why is Word not suitable? What are the disadvantages and disadvantages for you?"
I think that the Word mail merge can really make the work easier, using an Excel file automatically generated from the design software or the management software (ERP).
Direct Mail Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RsCf1G-Ewn0
Currently the documents are already in Word, and are individual files, they don't have graphics currently because we can say that it's version 1.0, and that in the future, I would be forced to integrate some.
By improving the system, I can improve the situation with paragraphs pasted with linking.
However, since the template is not interactive, the change in the pagination of the template does not occur in the respective documents.
If I understand correctly, what you said seems possible to develop an application with office tools.
Before thinking about this expensive solution in development, I would like to find an existing application.
I watched the video of the direct mail, the idea would be to see how well it would work with entire paragraphs.