BG Reklam: Automation of technical documentation creation

POS industry, engineering, POS products and POS materials as well as advertising are the foundations of BG Reklam's corporate business. Since the beginning of 2001, the company has been constantly striving to perfect the production process from concept to store. By uniting management, creativity and production, the company achieves full efficiency and keeps up with the times and the accelerated introduction of new technologies and materials.

In order to increase productivity, BG Reklam wanted to automate the process of creating technical documentation for the production of parts from sheet material.

As the factory is already equipped with high-quality CNC machines for cutting and bending, it was necessary to create high-quality documentation in dxf format that the machines could understand and use.

The specificity of BG Reklam's production is reflected in the fact that the parts are first processed by cutting and then cut. Although BG Reklam has Autodesk product collections, it was not possible to use only Autodesk Inventor CAM and Autodesk Inventor Nesting. The plan was to keep the existing workflow with the use of Autodesk Inventor Nesting and the generation of DXF files as much as possible.

Inventor parts and assemblies are filled with information that is often the same and taken from the assembly they belong to. The automation developed an interface to enter and copy data for the assembly to the parts. Each subsequent part added to the assembly downloads the required data, and the user only adds the specific part data. Material data is selected from drop-down menus to prevent incorrect entries. Once the data is entered, the part is automatically saved in a specific location with a standardized name for easy search. CNC machines use the sketch contours from which the individual features in Inventor parts are created. An interface was created to change the feature names to correspond to the manufacturing process. The add-on by TeamCAD adjusts the sketch colors to the company standard, making it easier for CNC machine implementation. Next, the application of Autodesk Inventor Nesting and part arrangement by board should be exported in dxf format to create dxf files for CNC machines. TeamCAD also developed a plug-in for Autodesk AutoCAD to process dxf drawings generated by Autodesk Inventor. The "NESTPROFILE" command arranges the parts by copying the layout specified by the nesting and creates a dxf file containing the positions, quantities, and color representation for the machine to understand dxf contour meshes.

Two types of documentation had to be produced in the BG Reklam. The first is the idw standard documentation, which is automated so that the plugin collects all parts from the board for the selected assembly and creates a front view for each part.

If the part is made of sheet metal, the development status is also displayed. The documentation is generated as an idw file and as a pdf. Each drawing is stored in a separate folder in accordance with the BG Reklam standard for filing and labeling the documentation.

Another type of documentation is informative for machine operators. It contains a layout of the circuit board with the arrangement of the parts and a QR code that links to the dxf file to be loaded into the machine.

In this way, more than 80% of the time spent on production documentation could be saved. With each subsequent production of a new product series, it is sufficient to set new parameters for nesting, save the newly created arrangement of parts by plates on the hard disk and start creating the documentation.

In addition, the user no longer has to enter the names of the technologies used in production using the keyboard, which ensures the accuracy and consistency of the data entered.

Tools have been created that automate the creation of documentation and the data is uniform and precise, which significantly contributes to the simplification and acceleration of daily work processes and better quality of work without errors.