CIMdata PLM Industry Summary Online Archive
1 December 2008
Implementation Investments
PTC Accelerates Delivery of Porsche’s Maintenance and Repair Manuals
PTC announced that Porsche, the German premium car manufacturer, is using PTC’s Arbortext dynamic publishing software to streamline the creation and distribution of its maintenance and repair manuals. The solution is currently being used by more than 650 authorized Porsche maintenance and repair shops globally. Arbortext is at the heart of Porsche’s technical documentation system integrating all maintenance- and repair-related information and documents in a single web-based platform. By maximizing the reuse of document components, maintenance and repair information is now created much more efficiently and service quality has also improved significantly as service documentation is now always up-to-date.
Enabling shorter development cycles while managing a growing number of new models and equipment variants is not only a challenge for product development engineers, but also for technical editors serving the aftermarket. They have to generate more maintenance and repair documents while delivering that documentation to the maintenance and repair shops faster than ever before. Porsche selected PTC Arbortext because of its ability to help customers overcome these challenges through its component-based authoring tools, the incorporation of industry standards and best practices within the solution, and its ability to publish to multiple formats such as PDF, print and web.
“In the past, our manuals were produced using different processes, software and even different hardware platforms, which made information reuse very difficult,” said Dr. Ulrich Lutz, head of after sales engineering, Porsche. “In many instances, information was already outdated before it had even reached the maintenance and repair shops. One of the main reasons for implementing PTC Arbortext as the core element of our new maintenance and repair information system was to have one single platform providing online access.”
The number of electronics control units in cars is constantly growing. As a consequence the amount of diagnostics to run is increasing. This also impacts the volume of repair and maintenance manuals necessary. As an example: The Porsche 993 has four control units, Porsche 996 contains eleven and the Cayenne has 40 control units. The manual for the Cayenne consists of 16 folders, which means more than 70,000 pages. This makes it necessary to reuse information wherever possible, thus enabling technical editors to generate more documents with the same number of staff. Moving forward, this will also enable Porsche to have the repair and maintenance manuals for the new Panamera sport limousine ready for its launch in 2009. Speed and quality of service in the repair and maintenance shops has improved considerably due to more up-to-date information, easy access via the Internet and the ability to collect failure and reliability information on-line.
“To effectively manage the increasing complexity of product development in the automotive industry, companies have to broaden their PLM initiatives beyond engineering to include technical documentation and after sales,” said Joshua Fredberg, senior vice president, product and market strategy, PTC. “We are proud that Porsche, a company built upon delivering a standard of excellence to its customers, has selected PTC as its service manual publication partner.”
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