Information is solid gold for today's manufacturers. But sometimes disseminating it can cause headaches. You have one 3D system, and your tooling vendor has another. Your artwork department doesn't use 3D but still needs your data. You can write out your assembly or operating instructions, but pictures are worth more words, and you don't have space for them anyway. How do you cope? You can buy something like Seemage 4 (it's French, so it's pronounced Sem-AHzh).

Seemage 4

The folks at Seemage have a seemingly simple mantra: product info everywhere. It's an ambitious goal, but they seem to have a pretty good handle on it. They treat engineering data as a corporate resource. The company was founded in France in 2002, and it has a lot of big European customers such as Peugeot and Renault. They've only been in the U.S. market since last year but have already signed up clients such as John Deere and Volvo Trucks.

Figure 1. Seemage 4 can read and use many popular 3D modeling formats. If you don't see something you can use on this list, what are you using?

Seemage 4 deals with product documentation in which main and service procedures most often are separate documents. Built for speed and accuracy, Seemage 4 files are relatively small because they can be associated to engineering files. They aren't just bit-maps. Seemage 4 can import all kinds of popular 3D formats (figure 1). It's based on XML and can output many file formats, including 3D PDF, HTML, JT, AVI and QuickTime animations. Seemage 4 integrates well within PDM and PLM systems, too. Free plug-ins are available for distribution.

Seemage 4 comes in three varieties with prices ranging from $3,000 to $15,000. The Viz package allows you to integrate data from wherever you have it and document whatever you want. The next step up is Mockup, which adds the ability to create animations and advanced visualizations. Finally, the Publish package lets users output their data in useful ways. With Seemage 4, you can change your written procedures and process specifications from confusing text-based documents to informative and clear graphics-based presentations. In short, you can better explain your designs.

Nuts and Bolts