Complete The Workflow

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I hear you guys. Loud and clear - complete the workflow. When I ask users what can we do to continue improving our products, most of the time it has something to do with completing a workflow. And over the last couple of releases I think you are seeing that, and not just in Inventor but in the products that re-purpose the Inventor model for analysis, marketing, tech pubs, manufacturing, and so on.

Here is a great example of that complete workflow with Autodesk Inventor Publisher. I'm a big fan of Publisher guys, I think I've made that pretty clear over the last couple of months. Largely due to the last several years almost every customer I've ever visited always had something to say about how far behind the tech pubs department was as compared to engineering and assembly. I can walk through almost any manufacturing and assembly area and find photographs of an assembly procedure as part of the assembly instructions. Photos - which means that somebody had to have a physical model in order to create these instructions.

This process most likely took a great deal of time, potentially delaying a project or two and putting more than a few gray hairs on the heads of many a manufacturing engineer. Why the delay? It's obvious and a total two sided coin. Engineering doesn't want to give access to anyone outside of engineering an incomplete design. Tech pubs doesn't want to work with an incomplete design because otherwise they are doubling or even tripling their efforts every time something changes from engineering. So it just becomes status quo that tech pubs and assembly instruction creation is behind the first physical prototype.

This is a specific use case that Inventor Publisher is perfect for. With the latest release of Inventor Publisher, tech pubs can log into Autodesk Vault, get a version of the assembly and start creating documentation while engineering is still putting the final touches on the design. Once the model is complete, the Inventor Publisher user simply selects update after getting the most recent version and all the snap shots automatically update, even files that were created for line art or images for a word document can be updated in the document by re-publishing the image files and updating them in Word.

Re-purposing the engineering model for tech pubs is now not only a reality, its a requirement for many fo the customers I've been visiting with lately. Have a look at this new video from the Tech Marketing team, its a great example of completing the workflow.