Microsoft Html Help Workshop
Microsoft Html Help Workshop
The New Edge in Manufacturing
A shop floor operator is tasked with assembling a landing gear for an infrequently ordered aircraft. After finding the work instructions and schematics, he cautiously begins the assembly. However, due to lack of familiarity and unclear visual examples, he breaks a critical component. The result is trashed landing gear and increased cycle time.
On the other side of the country, a Global 2000 company plans to roll out a new drilling system across multiple manufacturing locations in different countries. How can they provide operator training before they ever hit the plant, and jump-start production deadlines?
There are many challenges facing manufacturing organizations today. Complex and infrequently performed tasks don't allow sufficient practice to maintain skills, and just-in-time access to reference materials and subject matter experts may not be possible all the time. The result is often delayed repair and maintenance cycles, longer equipment downtime, increased costs and lost productivity.
Unless more effective training can be provided to shop floor workers, and better reference materials are made available on the ground, these issues will continue to present some of the biggest challenges,and opportunities, to manufacturers everywhere.
Fortunately, there is now a significant opportunity for improvement. 3D Interactive Knowledge Objects (3KOs) can address many deficiencies on the shop floor, and have been shown to deliver an ROI of between 49% and 212% in real world applications.
In his report, Assessment of Emerging Interactive 3D Solution for Post-Design Applications, industry analyst & consultant Clark Aldrich (formerly research director at the Gartner Group) concluded that using 3D Knowledge Objects, training on complex equipment can be delivered with twice the efficiency, effectively cutting training time in half while enhancing the learning experience and knowledge retention among students. And due to their light weight, 3KOs are deployable on common computers, providing users on the shop floor with instant access to instruction materials, procedural animations and references, whenever and wherever they need it.
The Knowledge Object solution is a new trend being applied in the defense and related manufacturing sector to maintenance training applications, to accelerate training, shorten time-to-proficiency and, enable first-time-right repairs in the field.
In the defense industry, 3KOs are being used in a range of scenarios, including:
1. Classroom: Whether embedded into PowerPoint or used on their own, 3KOs provide trainers with a powerful instructional aid that can simplify complex topics, accelerating student comprehension.
2. Laboratory: Unlike traditional hard trainers, on which students have limited time and often must share, 3KOs allow students to learn at their own pace, and watch and practice procedures repeatedly until the knowledge is retained. Virtual equipment delivers a more realistic experience to students. Students can view and interact with the virtual equipment in its entirety, rather than trying to learn procedures using individual equipment parts arranged on a board.
3. Workshop/Hangar: Hands-on time with the live equipment is an essential part of training that cannot be replaced by 3KOs. However, because there are almost always more students than live equipment, often more than 20 students per machine, 3KOs can be used in the workshop and hangar to give students something to practice with, while waiting for their turn with the live equipment.
Now Knowledge Objects can bring similar benefits to manufacturing by:
– Providing technicians with on-demand access to a fully interactive 3D knowledge base, allowing them to perform procedures correctly the first time, and improving productivity;
– Capturing and organizing complex equipment information from multiple, disparate sources within a single repository, and realizing increased production uptime through faster procedures; and,
– Augmenting work instructions with Knowledge Objects, which contain animated procedures, part properties, and links to external reference materials, and can be easily deployed on common desktop, laptop, and tablet PCs.
In manufacturing, the opportunity to draw on the benefits of interactive 3D Knowledge Objects can be achieved relatively faster than in many other sectors, by leveraging the organization's available 3D CAD data and other digital reference materials.
Available 3D data makes the creation of Knowledge Objects, which are the basis of the solution, easier and quicker. Applications are available to transform industry-leading CAD and interchange formats into Knowledge Objects, typically in a matter of minutes, depending on the complexity of the files.
Once converted to NGRAIN 3KOs, models built with the 3D data cannot be reverse-engineered, protecting the underlying intellectual property.
Organizations that do not have access to 3D data can leverage the professional services of their solution provider to create 3KOs using proven modeling techniques and methodologies, in a relatively short time.
Once a 3KO is rendered into the NGRAIN format, related product knowledge is embedded into the various components of the 3D equipment. This knowledge can be in the form of hyperlinks to existing digital reference materials including Adobe Acrobat documents, Microsoft Office files, photographs and technical illustrations, and Web pages.
Procedural animations can also be created and incorporated into the 3KO, along with voice instructions, to help demonstrate procedures in a more easy-to-understand, easy-to-remember fashion.
A 3KO can then be distributed throughout the organization either through a LAN network, via e-mail or other preferred methods.
Training program managers and instructors can then incorporate the 3KOs into courseware, html pages or e-work instruction material.
Additionally, 3KOs can be integrated into an existing PLM or shop floor management pipeline.
In summary, some of key benefits of the Knowledge Object solution for manufacturing include:
Improved Production Performance Rates – 3KOs provide technicians with on-demand access to a fully interactive 3D knowledge base, allowing them to perform procedures correctly the first time, which directly impacts productivity on the shop floor.
Reduced Equipment Downtime – Complex equipment information from multiple, disparate sources can be captured and organized within a single repository, helping the organization to realize increased production uptime through faster maintenance procedures.
Improved Effectiveness of E-Work Instructions – Augment work instructions with Knowledge Objects, which contain animated procedures, part properties, and links to external reference materials, and that can be easily deployed on common desktop, laptop, and tablet PCs.
Knowledge Objects, easily created by users of everyday computers, without the need for programming or scripting – can give manufacturing organizations a new edge in today's global and highly competitive economy. 3KOs are the underlying foundation for reduced production cycle times, improved product quality with less waste, and increased profitability.
About the Author
Andrew Morris is a Senior Solutions Architect for
NGRAIN Corporation
. He lives in Austin, Texas, and can be reached at [email protected]
Filezilla question. Re: list of MS programs to enable me to use fz?
Under compiling FZ it says need to install 3 ms programs before using FZ.
* MS Visual C++ 6
* The latest version of the MS Platform SDK from http://www.microsoft.com/msdownload/platformsdk/sdkupdate/
* MS HTML Help Workshop
Am I misunderstanding something?
Did the binaries not install? They don't require those extra programs. You only need them if you wish to modify the program. FillZilla is a great program BTW.
Microsoft Html Help Workshop
How to create .chm files
Improving Audio Glitch Resilience in Windows 7
Delivering excellent audio playback on a PC is one of those "much harder than it looks" technical challenges. Unlike dedicated audio / video devices, PCs have a lot going on during playback of audio and the playback happens on an incredible array of hardware and software. Many of you might be familiar with "glitches" that occasionally happen. In this post, Kristin Carr, a program manager on our Devices and Media team, describes some of the engineering in Windows 7 to improve this area representing the work of a number of folks across the team. One lesson I learned early in the product cycle is that we don't say "glitch-free" but rather "glitch-resilient" and hopefully that will make sense as you read this. --Steven
Have you ever used your PC to play an MP3 or a DVD? If you answered yes, you're among the overwhelming majority of PC customers who use their computer for audio and video applications, encompassing everything from watching a movie to playing a game to viewing a YouTube clip. But you may have also had an experience where your audio or video wasn't quite perfect – perhaps the video was a bit choppy or the audio stuttered. We call this a ‘glitch' – a perceived discontinuity in your audio or video that interrupts the playback experience. In this blog post, we'll be focusing on audio glitching: we'll examine the ecosystem challenges that can cause glitches, and we'll discuss the work we've been doing to improve the Windows 7 experience.
What Causes Glitching?
In previous posts, we've touched on a variety of ecosystem initiatives and challenges that we've undertaken for Windows 7, including application compatibility, accessibility, and system performance, among others. Tracing the root cause of audio glitching leads us to a similar place: because Windows runs on a huge variety of hardware configurations and multitasks between dozens of applications, it is challenging to ensure that all of the programs and drivers running on your computer will work together in exactly the way you expect.
Audio is especially sensitive. In order for you to hear music from your speakers, data needs to be delivered to your audio hardware approximately every 10 milliseconds, or 30 times in the blink of an eye! The challenge is that your PC is usually doing a lot of other things at the same time you're listening to music, such as streaming that YouTube video or downloading that new song, and many of these other tasks have complex timing requirements as well. As you can imagine, it doesn't take much – a slow network driver or a graphics driver that requires plenty of CPU time – to prevent your audio from reaching your ears in a continuous fashion.
So what are we doing to address this challenge? The answer is ‘lots!' – and the remainder of this blog post will be devoted to discussing these things:
1. Gathering data in order to characterize the problem
2. Developing a systematic method to detect and analyze glitches
3. Getting these tests and tools widely deployed, both at Microsoft and by our Windows partners
4. Engaging with partners to detect, diagnose and fix glitching issues
Putting the Tools to Work
Armed with these tests and tools, our next step was to deploy them on as many systems as possible. As part of this effort, we are participating in a Windows-wide initiative to help OEMs test their PCs at or before ship time. Hundreds of OEM machines get shipped to Microsoft for use in our Windows lab where we run thousands of tests in order to validate and ensure the best user experience. What this means is that if we notice that a particular machine or configuration might be susceptible to glitching, we can work with the OEM to try to fix the problem before the consumer ever sees their new PC.
By running these tests and analyzing the results with our new tools, we've been able to find hundreds of potential issues that would result in audio glitches. In some cases, this analysis resulted in changes to the Windows code. In other cases, we have identified components developed by our partners that can lead to audio glitching.
Engaging with Windows Partners
Since the issues we identify with these tools often involve components from many different partners, an important aspect of this work is engaging with these partners. Until now, it has been almost impossible for manufacturers to know how their components will affect the system as a whole, but by making these tests and tools available, we are attempting enable these partners to see how their components interact and what the final impact on users will be.
As part of this effort, we have been working to ensure that our partners can take full advantage of these new tools and tests. We've talked with OEMs, ODMs (original design manufacturers, who traditionally assemble the PC for the OEM), hardware manufacturers, and software vendors. We've given presentations and tutorials, written whitepapers, and held video conference workshops. Our goal has been to make it as easy as possible to create glitch-resilient software and hardware.
If you also have some questions after you read this article , you can visit the original article from:
http://www.pcwatch.com/News/Improving-Audio-Glitch-Resilience-in-Windows-7.html
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About the Author
Welcome to http://www.pcwatch.com to read the information of reviews on software,games and top tech products.
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Official Microsoft HTML Help Authoring Kit $39.99 If you are a developer or a Web site administrator, the Official Microsoft HTML Help Authoring Kit will make it easy for you to provide integrated Help systems that can be delivered via the World Wide Web or a corporate intranet. This book also contains essential Microsoft tools for software developers who are moving Help systems to distributed environments and those who need to maintain their Hel... |
Microsoft Html Help Workshop
