PMI + 3D PDF: a recipe for manufacturing efficiency
In a previous article, Is the blueprint obsolete?, I wrote about PDF and annotation as the 3D digital blueprint of the future. A large part of what I was referring to was the ability of Acrobat 3D to include Product Manufacturing Information (PMI) along with the “traditional” 3D geometries.
So I want to talk more about PMI: what is it, and why it is so important.
Short Version: PMI is all of the information required by a manufactuers to actually build a product. This includes data such as geometric dimensioning and tolerancing, 3D annotation (text) and dimensions, surface finish/roughness, and material specifications. This is sometimes also referred to as “design intent” or “3D Model Based Definition”
Most of the major CAD softwares provide tools for annotating parts with PMI, associating the information to edges and faces. The problem has been how to share this information downstream with suppliers and manufactuers. The engineers with the CAD software, can access all of this critical data. But how do you smoothly transfer this information to suppliers and others outside engineering so they complete and accurate manufacturing specifications? In other words, how do we provide the equivalent of a 2D blueprint in portable 3D digital form?
This is where Acrobat 3D v8 comes in. Acrobat 3D v8 will extract PMI from the major CAD formats (JT and CATIA) and include it along with the model view in the 3D PDF. Since the Acrobat Reader is free, and cross-platform, this offers a a cost effective, low risk way to deploy PMI throughout the entire supply chain.
Add in the ease of collaboration through commenting and Connect, and you are going to see a revolution in efficiencies.
As a big of a deal as PMI in Acrobat 3D is going to be (and it will be big!), I think an even bigger deal is going to be the PRC file format supported in Acrobat 3D 8. More on that in a future post.
