Creating technical manual for configurable product in PLM system

Abstract

In recent years companies have put more effort to developing their product documentation processes. One reason is shortened time-to-market cycles and increase of the more complex products on markets. Companies are turning more and more to systems which offer more efficiency and cost-effective processes for their document creation. Companies and their document authors have been bombarded for several years now about single sourcing methodology and content management systems (CMS), which has been told to fulfill the needs that companies and authors nowadays has, when speaking of documentation. This study focuses on Siemens PLM Software solution for creating documentation in PLM environment. Solution is called Teamcenter Content Management (Teamcenter CMS) which enables producing documents in XML language and publishing them in different delivery formats for instance in paper, PDF or HTML format . The main point in this study is to find out how Teamcenter CMS can answer the requirements that demanding, international machinery industry enterprise set for their user documentation and documentation process. Study is divided into two sections, to the literary part and to case study part. The first part explores the content management system and the structured documentation in overall. In the part the document and documentation process requirements are researched from the literary. In this thesis the case study part shows as an example of the one type of configurable product manual and its documentation process in Konecranes Oyj. Example demonstrates the documentation and its creation process in demanding machinery industry. Konecranes is one of the world largest producers of lifting equipments. In the results section all requirements are gathered together and Teamcenter functionalities and capabilities is assimilated to them. In conclusion Teamcenter CMS is a create tool for producing the configurable, standard documentation with multi languages. Teamcenter offers also easy environment for authoring and integration with Teamcenter PLM enables authors to use the benefits that PLM environment brings for the system. However some further development should be done to make the Teamcenter CMS to work seamlessly with Teamcenter PLM system and to connect documentation process fully as part of the product development process. /Kir10