At this year’s tekom annual conference, many exhibitors were represented with solutions for the preparation of 3D information for technical documentation and other subsequent processes. Obviously, the topic that PROSTEP has been dealing with for many years is in line with the trend of the times. Our stand was correspondingly well attended, and there were surprisingly many new interested parties who wanted to find out more about our range of HTML5 and 3D PDF-based service content solutions.

The focus of our trade fair appearance was our new service content portal and the extended possibilities of embedding 3D content for the service not only in 3D PDF documents, but also of publishing it in HTML5 format on the Web and thus facilitating access via mobile devices. The solution now offers companies the greatest possible flexibility in the provision of 3D spare parts catalogues and other service documents. Above all, however, it distinguishes itself from other solutions by the high degree of automation with which 3D data from design can be published together with structural information and other metadata. Recently, service engineers have even been enabled to enter comments into the portal, which are linked to the 3D data and stored on a server, enabling feedback from the field to quality assurance or development.

In addition to our service content portal, our 3D PDF-based solution for 3D assembly planning also met with great interest among tekom visitors. It offers machine and plant builders the opportunity to plan assembly at an earlier stage using 3D models from the design department and to calculate assembly costs reliably. Companies can make the assembly instructions available to their assembly workers in paperless form and even illustrate the assembly of complex assemblies with the aid of 3D animations. The high degree of automation of the solution, which can be easily integrated into the existing IT infrastructure, not only accelerates the creation of assembly instructions, but also their updating after changes.