Product category:
Publishing and documentation software for Engineering
News Release from: Itedo Software | Subject: IsoDraw
Edited by the Engineeringtalk Editorial
Team on 16 September 2004
Software helps meet US military manual
demands
When Engineered Arresting Systems Corp was awarded a contract to update the USAF manuals for its friction brake energy absorber, it has to rethink its technical illustration process.
Engineered Arresting Systems Corp (ESCO), part of Groupe Zodiac, is the world leader in the design and production of aircraft arresting systems ESCO offers a wide variety of equipment to meet the needs of air forces and navies worldwide
This article was originally published on Engineeringtalk on 2 Aug 2002 at 8.00am (UK)
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Engineered Arresting Systems Corp is committed to supplying products and services that meet the customer's specific requirements, are defect-free, and delivered on time.
Although ESCO designs systems for aircraft carrier applications, the bulk of their work is for land based systems, which are in use at virtually every military air base in the world.
The land based systems draw on ESCO's use of their extensive standard product offerings.
Specific customer systems can usually be assembled from a menu of standard equipment offerings: the standard equipment items are assembled into a custom system to meet each customer's specific requirements.
Of course, this also has an influence on the product documentation.
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By integrating IsoDraw CADprocess, Wieland Electric has improved the workflow between its design and documentation departments.
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Until 1990, ESCO created custom manuals for each commercial system it produced.
However, the level of effort for producing custom manuals required a large staff.
ESCO switched to a modular organisation of manuals, where each equipment item has its own module, and then a central system section is produced to explain how the individual items work together as a system.
Still, the work load for the Technical Publications Group at ESCO is enormous: ESCO produces various types of manuals, in military and commercial formats, such as operations and maintenance manuals, illustrated parts breakdowns, and overhaul manuals.
These manuals are produced in paper versions, as well as PDF versions that can be distributed on CD.
Furthermore, ESCO is planning to make the manuals available to customers on the ESCO website.
Another challenge is that for the US military, ESCO must often produce manuals to the latest Mil-Spec requirements, whereas for other customers, ESCO's standard commercial manuals are normally acceptable.
Having introduced Itedo's IsoDraw into the documentation workflow at ESCO in 2000, the company is now able to comply to both military specifications and commercial requirements on a high quality and time-efficient level.
Until 1999 the Technical Publications Group at ESCO produced board artwork by hand.
By that time, the two illustrators could barely keep up with the existing workload.
When ESCO was awarded a contract to update the United States Air Force (USAF) manuals for the friction brake energy absorber, something needed to be done.
The increase in workload could not be handled by the existing staff using the current methods of production.
In addition, certain requirements of the contract forced ESCO to make a change at that time.
One of the contract requirements was to deliver all artwork for the USAF manuals not only embedded into the manuals, but also as separate CGM files.
The USAF expects to make its own changes to the manuals in the future.
ESCO had to convert to graphics workstations, immediately.
The delivery requirements of the USAF contract provided the final push for ESCO to convert to computerised art.
The Tech Pubs Manager and the Senior Illustrator worked together to select a combination of programs that would accommodate the USAF contract, and still allow all of their commercial manual requirements to be met.
In addition, ESCO had some goals of its own.
The company was expecting to start distributing manuals to customers on CD.
This allows customers to print as many copies of the manuals as they want, at their location.
This would save ESCO the time and effort of running off copies, and save the customers the expense of shipping reams of paper across the world.
ESCO also wanted to post its manuals as PDF files on the corporate intranet.
A long range goal is to have online interactive parts manuals, using object oriented art as the hotspot for part selection.
"After looking at several offerings, we settled on IsoDraw for the graphics, and FrameMaker to produce the final documents".
"The ability of IsoDraw to handle a wide variety of drawing formats was a major point in making the choice".
"IsoDraw was also clearly superior in the production of CGM files, and offered ease-of-use features superior to the competition", reports Dan Keller, Manager of the Technical Publications Department at ESCO.
FrameMaker was chosen for its ability to import CGM files, as well as its ease of use when converting completed manuals to PDF files.
FrameMaker uses Itedo's CGM import filter, and this helps minimise interface problems between the two programs.
That was four years ago.
The USAF manual was successfully completed, on-time and under budget.
In addition, the artwork created for that project gave ESCO a good database for producing its own manuals.
The company now has a total of seven energy absorber manuals completed and online.
These manuals are all "digital" and have 100% CGM artwork files.
For all of its equipment items, the company has about 50 modular manuals online, although not all of them have been converted to CGM artwork - IsoDraw and FrameMaker also allow the use of TIFF and JPEG files.
Apart from that, the company has produced over 60 system manuals.
Of those 60 system manuals, nine are completely "digital", meaning ESCO can produce and distribute the entire manual on CD, without ever printing a page until the CD gets to the customer.
"Although it is still a work-in-progress, our conversion to computer graphics and desktop publishing has gone smoothly".
"We are now producing higher quality products, and at lower cost".
"Thanks to IsoDraw we are seeing a reduction of more than 30% in production time over the entire life of a project", concludes Keller.
Nancy Anderson, Senior Technical Illustrator at ESCO adds: "Having tried other software packages I find that IsoDraw has some very useful tools that we utilise often".
"I find the extrusion tool and the 3D transformation window saves us a lot of drawing time when importing the 2D CAD data produced by our design group".
"The Find Ellipses is another tool that saves a lot of the illustrator's time".
"Instead of the illustrator trying to calculate the degree of ellipse, IsoDraw automatically does it for you; very time saving, it's neat".
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