Electronics maker CASIO uses Lattice3D’s tools to directly publish 3D design data to a variety of customer manuals created around the world.
CASIO is a large electronic consumer goods manufacturer, with annual
revenues of $3.5 billion and 13,000 employees spread across more than 33
countries.
The company needed to find a better, more cost-effective way to publish
its consumer manuals. A major challenge it faced was creating customer and
employee manuals for all its 14 categories of products -- including digital
cameras, cash registers, musical instruments, PCs, LCDs and calculators --
across
many different languages, while still maintaining a high quality of
information and instruction.
Overall, CASIO’s manual production process was bulky and time-consuming.
As a new consumer product was designed or upgraded, each subsequent department
had to wait for each prior cycle to complete so they could recreate visual
design data in a format they could use. For example, a 3D design would be
released to the production teams, at which point 2-dimensional, hand-drawn
drawings would be created for the shop floor manuals and instructions. The
packaging and logistical departments would have “dead-time” until the data they
needed was transmitted down to them in, again, recreated, often hand-drawn
formats. Once the product was in production, experienced graphics designers
would be needed to manually translate the product design into graphics for the
customer manuals.
This result was a giant bottleneck. The company looked for a solution and
discovered Lattice3D’s XVL applications.
Lattice3D lets CASIO publish 3D design data directly into its manuals,
reducing overall production time by more than 50%. With the Lattice3D
applications, CASIO’s 3D visual data can be created with a single mouse click,
often during the design process and before a product was fully released to the
Production teams. In addition, the graphics created are now in a size and format
that can be sent directly to departments in other countries to be used in their
localized customer manuals. This use and reuse of 3D data ensures that quality
representations of CASIO’s products are standardized throughout the
organization.
“We found that Lattice3D enabled a much more concurrent
workflow for our new product releases,” said Mr. Kashiwakuma, manager of R&D
at CASIO. “With XVL, work on manufacturing instructions, logistical planning and
even consumer manuals could occur rapidly and before the entire design process
was completed. This immediately made a huge difference for us in our times for
releasing a product to market. The accuracy and quality of our shop floor
manuals also started improving immediately. We now estimate that our manual
creation process has been reduced by half while we now have high-quality
graphics standards throughout our international
operation.”
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