Right Hemisphere moves 3D design dataoutside the engineering department
By Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 5/1/2007 12:00:00 AM
What do technical publication specialists, trainers, advertising agencies, and service organizations all have in common? Answer: the need to work with, and share, 3D visualizations of complex designs.
It's a need that drives some manufacturers to extreme measures: deploying expensive CAD software licenses, for example, to people who don't design products, but who do work with 3D product representations to create advertisements, training materials, and other types of print collateral.
Such downstream uses of 3D design representations are bread-and-butter to Right Hemisphere, a vendor that in less than 10 years has built an impressive list of blue-chip Fortune 500 customers—including 10 percent of the Fortune 100—for its cost-effective means to product-based communication and collaboration. These include Lockheed Martin, Pratt & Whitney, DaimlerChrysler, Raytheon, and Boeing.
What's more, the solution supplements core 3D CAD data with pertinent information drawn from other systems—bills of material and product data, for example—with which to draw up a product repair manual, a parts catalog, or “exploded cutaway” diagram in a glossy brochure.
This is what product data management (PDM) and product life-cycle management (PLM) systems are supposed to do, of course—except that most times, PDM and PLM function primarily as engineering systems.
Rix Kramlich, a company VP with Right Hemisphere, says the vendor's solution “adds a layer that doesn't presently exist within the PLM process, optimized—as it is today—for the engineering department.”
Right Hemisphere's solution builds on emerging layer of solutions from Adobe Systems that reconcile business practices—how things really get done—with the business process, as automated and constrained by the enterprise systems.
Adobe PDF, Adobe Acrobat, and Acrobat 3D allow secure sharing of information—including live data taken from diverse systems—in an information packet. Adobe LiveCycle builds structure around collaboration practices.
Right Hemisphere complements Adobe LiveCycle, for which Right Hemisphere is a reseller. Its own software plugs into and extends Acrobat 3D for 1) collaborative design & sourcing; 2) technical publications and training; 3) service & support; and 4) sales & marketing to automate graphics and document creation, and facilitate a higher level of collaboration.
“It's about delivering data in the format appropriate for the end user, whether that end user is a component supplier or a marketing agency,” says Kramlich. “We can deliver that data in a PDF, but also drop a 3D visualization into a PowerPoint slide, if that's what the user wants. In short, just because the visualization came from a CATIA seat doesn't mean that you need a CATIA seat to work with it downstream.”
