The comment that making a manual is too big and would need constant revision is FUNNY!
CAD engineer expresses business wisdom. Will that make money or just add to overhead?
The real world does not compute, it functions with people. Anyone learning complex tasks has two options at being competent quickly. 1. the traditional way of having a master hover and teach a student while producing a lot of poor quality scrap. 2. A BOOK that tells you what the system/machine/procedure/formula is and how to check it in process, what's important. The reason is simple. People are good at picking what they need out of a lot of stuff just by looking at it. Both examples require a person to sort through a lot of data to find just one aspect. Who gets to do that is the only difference... oh, and how much scrap they make along the way.
Its why two generations old of tech using CAM can still out perform RAM; or perhaps you will see it more clearly with: why parallel data transfer is more efficient than serial data transfer.
A short personal story. I managed a small product line for HP in Singapore from California, about $40M/year at the time. The delinquencies every month were running 10-20%.
With two books in two months I mastered MRP and Excel (at the time it was a new program that was beginning to impact profit analysis). I produced an MRP tracking system that took those delinquencies to less than 1/10 of a percent per month run on a pc, which had less computing power than your phone. They used it to manage the production for over 10 years. (way past having commercial options that would have fully automated the process mostly because the workers were more important than profits, which were better because of the customer satisfaction).
In parallel there was a consultant building a main frame, big business custom solution to the same problem, which did not solve the problem, but it did deliver the management reports that were needed to predict profits. So, a person used the MRP system on a pc to upload the data into the management system on the main frame. Presumably, with the management better informed, dealing with the delinquencies... and planning strategies were going to fix the problem. It took just two months with a book something that took a year of consulting time that didn't solve the problem. The recovered delinquencies paid for the consultants... a win-win? The improvement was immediate and long term.
Would Autodesk like to see their market double in months or years?
Consider the market. 1/2 of businesses fail in 2 years. If it takes two years to learn F360 in a painful, full of failures method, what are the odds that F360 will participate in that process? The current method is exponentially limiting its penetration into the market, when the solution to exponentially expand your market is screaming at you from people who know how effective the right approach can be.
The need will not go away. And, it is a barrier to entry that is available to expand the market acceptance. One that Autodesk is imposing on itself...
The team you put together to make and keep current the BOOK, even an eBOOK that is easily printable, would produce more return quicker than any other solution your current team of apple polishers can do by adding a one keystroke fix to making all the fillets and chamfers in proportion to each other.
And your engineering analysis is correct, that one fix would mean a near total rewrite of multiple sections of the book... But, that's what "big data" is all about... a program could easily comprehensively identify all the connecting points and present them to a good editor for review and revision that makes sense... An editor who knows how people learn and how they search to get to the solutions. (not yet integrated into an AI).
If you wanted to take the easy way out... I don't recommend this. You could issue a version of F360 that will represent the learning bench. Don't change a thing. Then keep current the "improvements manual" as the step to the latest to the hour version of F360. I doubt the investment for this approach will do anything for your costs and it opens the door to a competitive target for competing with you for emerging markets.
It could be a long term investment, or massively hit it with consultants and keep the best of the best core for the long term support. The financial analysis in developing new markets that have been identified as 1. Huge. 2. Not a fad. and 3 will continue to proliferate as long as people are replaced by automation... All point to solid reasons for getting an Instruction MANUAL out ASAP. This thread is 3 years old... pitiful.
Of course, you can pretend that people are like vending machines... You have to put everything into them one at a time... and they will continue to look for an alternative, or give up in frustration and never look back.
The future is yours to lose.
B
