Manufacturers worldwide face increasing pressure to boost innovation, reduce costs, and accelerate time to market. To improve decision-making in the early stages and reduce costly rework in the later stages of the product lifecycle, manufacturers must streamline design collaboration among dispersed extended product teams. By distributing 3D designs and other related project information more securely and reliably, manufacturers can effectively manage and incorporate feedback from a wider group. Adobe solutions help manufacturers convert and publish 3D content to accurately communicate design intent, shortening cycle time and providing the competitive advantage manufacturers need to deliver better quality products to market, faster.

Leverage existing 3D designs to save time

Engineering design professionals can save time by using Adobe® Acrobat® 3D software to instantly capture and, in one step, convert 3D designs from major CAD applications — like Unigraphics NX, ProEngineer, CATIA V4 and V5, just to name a few — into Adobe PDF files. The PDF format enables extended team members to review designs without expensive CAD applications or specialty viewers and allows creative professionals to leverage 3D designs in rich interactive documents, such as technical service manuals, operations guides, and training catalogs.

Highlight design issues early in the product lifecycle to prevent rework

According to Gartner, more than three-quarters of a product’s lifecycle costs are committed in the earliest stages of product design. Manufacturers can improve their early decision-making, as well as reduce later errors, design changes, and review cycles, using embedded 3D content, which more accurately and visually communicates design intent to extended teams — employees, customers, partners, and suppliers.

Streamline collaboration to improve time to market

With Acrobat 3D, manufacturers can add more participants from extended teams into reviews to streamline review cycles by activating rights to features in free Adobe Reader® software that enable document review, markup, and approval. By enriching collaborative workflows, such as work-in-progress design reviews, with 3D designs, Acrobat 3D helps manufacturers reduce design interpretation errors and associated rework. Manufacturers can also streamline routine document-based processes, such as Requests for Proposals, contracts, presentations, and product catalog distribution, by using Acrobat 3D to combine multiple document formats into a single searchable package for easy reference and archiving.

Add document security and control to better protect proprietary designs

With Acrobat 3D advanced security features, such as password protection, encryption, and digital signatures, manufacturers can better protect sensitive designs inside and outside the firewall — both online and offline. To further safeguard sensitive information, engineering project managers can enhance document control with Adobe LiveCycle™ Policy Server software by creating security policies for Adobe PDF documents. These policies include revoking document access and preventing document copying, printing, forwarding, and more even after the documents have been distributed beyond the corporate firewall.