Cortona3D RapidManual Cuts Gas Boiler Development Time significantly

 

Logicom creates customized products for customers whose technologies must be rapidly understood. Animated and interactive eManuals, eLearning, and sales materials can explode and rotate drawings, ask questions and check answers. Logicom staff spent months of complex programming to deliver such high functionality. When they sought a more efficient toolset, most solutions wouldn't import CAD drawings, or had no authoring tools.

 

Only Cortona3D's several purpose-built toolsets could import and optimize CAD, speed actual authoring, and publish electronically. Today, Cortona3D expedites programming tasks, while it helps clarify every concept of the customer's message. And Logicom's clients can hand out their manuals, lessons, and marketing collateral to students, engineers and prospects far sooner than before.

 

Customer Description

 

Founded in 1981, Logicom Computer Services (UK) Ltd. in Milton Keynes, UK, develops next-generation, animated and interactive manuals, Web and computer-based training (CBT). Logicom customers must convey complex messaging that is rapidly understandable by a wide spectrum of public.

 

Logicom's highly awarded animated and interactive 3D work products satisfy that requirement far better than paper manuals or static electronic manuals.

Animation's "moving mental images" stick in users' minds

Interactive animations involve students and invite repetitive playing

Text, visuals, and audio drive home vital points simultaneously

Opportunistic learning is portable, convenient, and fascinating

A notebook PC replaces hundreds of pounds of manuals

Materials are economical to duplicate and disseminate

 

To speed learning and decrease errors, users can zoom in, rotate and interact with the boiler, as well as watch and practice simulations of procedures before they are actually executed.

 

British Gas, amongst many of Logicom's clients, has been a major Logicom customer since 2000.  The energy giant's customers and engineers have benefited directly and indirectly from Logicom's computer based virtual reality programmers. Logicom efficiently develops its work products for British Gas using Cortona3D's RapidLearning and RapidManual toolsets.

 "When Logicom began assisting British Gas, most training was in the classroom, paper-based, with little simulation. Today nearly all is computer based training (CBT)," says Majid Al-Kader, PhD, New Media Director at Logicom.

 

Situation

 

Before discovering Cortona3D toolkits, Logicom developed less sophisticated eLearning and manuals using tools designed for video gaming. "They were all that was available, and they fell short in so many ways," says Al-Kader. "Other tools we've reviewed are incomplete or slow to work with. They can't import, or they don't really address the very crucial authoring phase. Before Cortona3D, we were far from efficient."

 

Why Select Cortona3D

 

"We spent six months studying every CBT development toolset we could find," says Al-Kader. "Cortona3D came out on top for a long list of reasons. It's by far the best-suited to interactive eLearning and manuals. It's also well priced and has excellent support."

 

Cortona3D RapidLearning is an out-of-the-box training toolkit purposed for teaching real-world maintenance skills. RapidManual streamlines development of animated, interactive manuals. Cortona3D toolkits import and optimize CAD and other source material, then combine them with procedural data from PLM and ERP. Cortona3D's library of engineering animations automates once-laborious programming tasks, so complex simulations are easily created. Cortona3D tools enable interactive questioning and branching logic. They speed publishing and dissemination to Web, DVD or hard drive, for use in class or on the job.

 

Cortona3D swiftly imports CAD files, Al-Kader reports, "But in the real world, customers often can't provide them. So Cortona3D's flexibility lets us work from a variety of source material. And modifications are easy."

 

Unlike many systems that work with engineering diagrams, Cortona3D requires no high-end graphic workstations for developer or users. Cortona3D tools and their end products run on Microsoft Windows XP and Windows 2000 PCs with a 1.5GHz processor and standard graphics card. Other Cortona3D customers include Airbus, Oracle, BMW, Ford, Sukhoi, ABB, Boeing, NIST, Loral, US Army, ESA, Pfizer, and NASA.

 

The "Worcester, Bosch Boiler Manual," is a comprehensive, animated and interactive manual to train engineers in safe and efficient repairs - more effective because it is visual and interactive.

 

Representative Projects

 

Using other products in the Cortona3D line, including RapidLearning, Logicom deploys custom-built training solutions for many organizations including Worcester, Bosch Group, one the largest boiler and heating system manufacturers in Europe. The "Worcester, Bosch Virtual Boiler Manual," is a comprehensive, animated and interactive manual to train engineers in safe and efficient repairs.

 

"This training is memorable, realistic, accurate, and conforms to accepted best-practice learning procedures, and of course service procedures," says Al-Kader. "There are dozens of boilers with thousands of parts that fit only one way, or else public safety is at risk. And not knowing what a given boiler requires can stretch one house call into two, thus doubling costs. Also, some students are self-driven, while others need more help or time with materials. Logicom products address every issue. A student can't take a boiler on his train ride home, but can review repair techniques on several boilers from a notebook PC in that hour's ride."

 

"After completing the training, if an engineer wants to verify something in the field, he / she checks the animated manual on his laptop. They can 'explode' the boiler, even rehearse repair steps. Maintenance lorries should carry tools and parts, not boxes of paper manuals.

 

"Engineers are a practical lot," says Al-Kader. "If they see a way that is safer, faster and saves money, they reach for it. We have wonderful feedback from customers and their employees on ease of learning and repair time saved."

 

The Worcester, Bosch manual will be published early 2007. Every engineer who installs and services boilers gets the manual on DVD and is able to access it online.

 

Also, Logicom has also created a multiple award winning (both the Gas industry and the Chamber of Commerce Awards) large educational program targeting energy and climate change which will be released this year.

 

Al-Kader reports, "In one week with Cortona3D, we created and delivered a sales presentation persuasively demonstrating the energy-saving benefits of a new gearbox."

 

Benefits In Hand

 

"We've seen other software products try to match Cortona3D," says Al-Kader, "but they don't touch its clarity of instruction, speed of development, and value."

 

"We move more surely and faster with Cortona3D," says Al-Kader. "The software comes with maintenance-specific animations and libraries, e.g., 'Screw in bolt' and 'Unscrew nut' that make development of complex simulations faster and easier than other solutions. We finish projects much faster now.

 

"That gives us a huge competitive edge in delivery time, value, and quality we deliver. But factually, it's hard to compare, because other tools can't do much of what we need. Cortona3D is purpose-built to step someone with no 3D expertise through the building of interactive manuals and training."