Document Drawings In Hours Instead Of Days

The technical documentation is always under time pressure - technical editors were only able to start when a prototype of new products was available to create the photo story for the instructions. CAD data was only used by the illustrators to illustrate the photo story, which was therefore only possible at a later date. Thanks to modern software, technical editors today generate illustrations directly from the CAD data and massively accelerate the creation of technical documentation. This also has a major impact on the maintenance and recording of product data, which also include illustrations.

The toilet as a matter of course

Only a surprisingly short time ago, toilets in apartments have been a matter of course. An important step was the invention of Caspar Melchior Albert Gebert. He had founded an installation company in Rapperswil in 1874 and manufactured the first cistern in 1905. The cisterns made of wood and lined with lead were mass-produced as early as 1909. The cisterns are manufactured today in the German village of Pfullendorf north of Lake Constance, the headquarters are still in Jona.

Picture gallery

Picture gallery with 5 pictures

The overall portfolio of the Geberit Group is divided into several areas: The bathroom systems with the Geberit AquaClean shower toilets, ceramic articles, bathroom furniture, etc. In short: the products in front of the wall. Geberit also supplies the installation systems as well as the supply and drainage systems, all of which are installed behind the wall. The portfolio also includes special tools and planning software.

Complex operating instructions

The products are mainly intended for installation by installation specialists who install different products every day. In addition to the basics of installation, the operating instructions must also contain the particular features and requirements of the products. In addition, the products are sold around the world, so many different language versions are required - optimally, the documents do not need any text that needs to be translated. There are also catalogs and technical documents for installers, architects and building owners, which are available in 24 countries and 32 languages.

250,000 documentation drawings a year

The documentation department is accordingly large: Ten technical editors, three catalog managers, three translation managers, one terminologist and four illustrators are busy all year round, 250,000 technical documentation drawings, 10,000 product images, dozens of pictograms, 3000 type plates and other graphic illustrations, and around 500,000 Keeping text modules up to date and using them to create the many documentation, catalogs and technical guides with which Geberit supplies its customers.

That was difficult in and of itself, but when Geberit took over the Finnish sanitary ware manufacturer Sanitec in 2014, previous working methods and processes had to be reconsidered and adapted, because the new sanitary ware division added a large number of products for which documentation was also created had to. In addition, Sanitec was active in the end customer business, the requirements for catalogs and documents are fundamentally different from the previous documentation.

Geberit has been using digital product development with the Catia CAD system since 1987. In the documentation, Adobe Illustrator was used in addition to an editorial system that manages text and images and automatically converts them into layouts.

In the past, everything was more complex: illustration only after the construction was completed

The workflow for creating a product illustration - for example for assembly instructions - has previously started with a step file from Catia, which was imported into Illustrator. There were two problems with this transfer, firstly, when importing into Illustrator, a 2D image was created in exactly the view orientation in which the model was saved, so it was not possible to change the perspective afterwards. On the other hand, Illustrator took over all the auxiliary and construction lines from the CAD file, which caused enormous rework. Therefore it only made sense to start the illustration when the construction was finally completed.

The illustrators helped themselves to put the individual parts of the object, eg a concealed cistern, on different layers. This enabled them to show or hide the required parts for the various pictures in assembly instructions. Any further addition of a picture, e.g. For example, an enlargement of details or missing components such as hoses and lines in the CAD model had to be drawn by hand. Since the transfer of the CAD data was so complex, it was limited to one perspective whenever possible, for example from the left. However, that was a disadvantage if you wanted to show something that had to be mounted on the right side of the product.

Werner Trefzer, Head of Product Communication, remembers: “It was an extremely complex process: the technical editor defined a series of images and passed this job on to an illustrator. The illustrators drew this sequence of pictures and then gave them back to the technical editors, who checked that all the assembly steps were shown correctly. If this was not the case, the entire sequence of images went back to the illustrator, who was already working on the next order. So each iteration step might take a few weeks."

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Content of the article:

• Page 1: Document drawings in hours instead of days
• Page 2: Load 3D CAD models directly into Iso-Draw

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