Kraft takes crafty route to technical illustration

Edited by the Engineeringtalk editorial team Oct 7, 2003

Kraft Foods was an early adopter of the IsoDraw CADprocess software package.

Kraft Foods is the second largest food company in the world.

The company, which includes Kraft Foods International and Kraft Foods North America, spans five core sectors: snacks, beverages, cheese, grocery and convenient meals.

Among the company's famous brands are Kenco, Philadelphia, Toblerone, Maxwell House and Milka - to name only a few.

However, this is not the whole story.

As only a few people might know, there is one department at the Kraft site in Banbury, UK where the company designs coffee vending machines.

A third party manufactures the equipment, but the design and documentation is originated by Kraft itself.

Although the vending machines make up only a part of the overall range of Kraft products, they have a strong market reach.

Eight different models, each having several variants, are produced and exported to various European countries.

Also, some selected models are produced for the US market.

For export reasons, the documentation must be translated into several languages, mainly German, French and Spanish, but - depending on the model - also into Scandinavian languages.

The Technical Publications Department at Banbury - the only one in the whole Kraft Foods group - produces two types of manuals both of which are fully illustrated.

By using illustrations in the documentation, the high quality levels are ensured.

In other words: repair or maintenance instructions - even complicated ones - can be understood more easily when represented through a graphic as opposed to long textual piece.

A consequence of this is savings on translation time and costs.

The service manual for service technicians contains all the diagnostic information.

It also includes all the spare parts illustrations for the ordering of replacement parts.

The operators handbook for the end user includes complete machine operation instructions and installations.

The question which naturally comes up now is: "Doesn't the creation of technical illustrations mean a lot of work and is it very time-consuming?" and: "How do the documentation specialists at Banbury cope efficiently with this high need for technical illustrations?".

The answer to this is easy: technical illustration at Kraft, Banbury is a tightly and well-organised process allowing for maximum productivity.

The core of this process is a software package called IsoDraw CADprocess by Itedo Software.

Kraft has been using this product since July 2000 and was one of its early adopters.

IsoDraw CADprocess reads original 3D CAD data via the Iges format and automatically transforms this into technical illustrations.

"By using our 3D design data from SolidWorks, we save the effort of drawing our illustrations from scratch.

Previous to the acquisition of CADprocess we had used the common graphics program Adobe Illustrator for illustrating.

This, however, did not allow the direct use of CAD data and therefore the illustration process required rather long preparation times", reports Howard Whitney, Technical Illustrator at Kraft.

As a matter of fact, the whole process has been streamlined and speeded up considerably since the introduction of CADprocess.

IsoDraw CADprocess helped to maintain the quality of the illustrations but just as importantly gave a much shorter leadtime for the production of the illustrations.

"As soon as the design process is finalised the illustrations can be completed very quickly meaning a minimum amount of modification work", says Whitney.

The crucial purchase decision was the link to the CAD system and the reduction of time in preparing the illustrations.

This has always been the main factor as Kraft purchased the first version of CADprocess.

As Kraft Foods has a Premium Service Contract with Itedo, the company is instantly provided with the latest product version as soon as this becomes available - and due to Itedo's regular update policy, there have been several product updates in the meantime, all of which came up with new benefits for the technical illustrator.

"The handling of our SolidWorks CAD files has become easier with every product update of IsoDraw CADprocess.

Therefore, we as technical illustrators have become independent from the help of our design people and this, too, accelerated the processes in our documentation department.

Through IsoDraw CADprocess we are experiencing a time-saving of approximately 50% per illustration compared to our former method with Adobe Illustrator", Whitney concludes.