Hydrohoist designs and manufactures boat lifts for worldwide commercial and consumer markets. Hydrohoist holds a patent on hydro-pneumatic boat lists and leverages SolidWorks to design products using 3D CAD. The direct benefits of 3D CAD allow the engineering department to maintain a leadership position and prototype new designs quickly. Engineers at Hydrohoist, a small company, are extremely valuable and are required to perform many facets of the business often relegated to other departments at larger companies. In this case, the small team of engineers is responsible for the creation of technical specifications that are delivered to marinas to describe product capabilities.
Tim, an engineer at Hydrohoist was using Microsoft Publisher to create technical specifications from his SolidWorks designs. There were a number of fundamental problems with Microsoft Publisher that prompted Tim to look for an alternative authoring tool.
A local reseller introduced Tim to QuadriSpace. The QuadriSpace products offered a manufacturing-specific solution to a broad problem and not only provided an improved publishing experience, but there were two additional benefits of the targeted solution. First, the time required to produce documents could be decreased because QuadriSpace allowed Tim to directly use the SolidWorks designs. Also, Tim was able to easily create interactive 3D documents that improved the communication benefits of the technical bulletins sent to customers.
To date, Tim has created 20+ bulletins using QuadriSpace. Some are delivered as standard PDF’s and some are published as interactive 3D PDF documents. This allows Hydrohoist to author the documents once and deliver them as interactive 3D documents to some customers and standard printed materials to others. Customers that have leveraged the interactive 3D documents indicate a significant communication.