For many companies, the cost-effective creation and distribution of technical drawings is a mission-critical component in their plans to become more competitive. Whether they use technical drawings to design new products, improve manufacturing productivity, manage facilities, or improve processes and procedures, the ability to efficiently create and manage technical drawings can have a direct impact on a company’s bottom line.

Surprisingly, many companies are still using inefficient and costly methods to create and manage the technical drawings that are a key part of their businesses. While they typically have implemented a new generation of Windows business applications, technical drawing software has often lagged behind.

A revolutionary product called Visio Technical is changing this, and an increasing number of Fortune 500 companies is taking advantage of the cost savings and efficiency that this product offers. In this white paper, we will discuss how Visio Technical can help you become more competitive by allowing you to:

• Lower your training and support costs
• Create technical drawings quicker and more cost-effectively
• Distribute technical drawing more efficiently
• Make your drawings more intelligent by linking them to databases
• Integrate your technical drawings with other Windows applications

Visio Technical was designed to make the creation, modification and distribution of technical drawings as easy and efficient as possible. Visio Technical completely conforms to Windows user-interface standards, providing familiar toolbars and pull-down menus that are easy to learn and use. Unlike most other technical drawing software, Visio Technical is completely designed from the ground up for Windows and is optimized for the Windows environment. As a result, Visio Technical fits seamlessly into today’s popular office suite environments.

This tight integration and compatibility with the Windows desktop means one thing – increased productivity. Visio Technical operates in a similar fashion to your other standard Windows applications – lowering training and support costs.

One of the most important components of the Microsoft Windows environment is a technology called OLE (Object Linking and Embedding). OLE is a standardized way of linking Windows applications and sharing data. OLE is a powerful tool that can be a key component of your corporate technology strategy. Visio has long been a leading example of superior integration with Microsoft Windows and Windows applications, thanks to its use of all the capabilities of OLE. Visio is a pioneer in the use of OLE technology and is a third-generation OLE application. Visio Technical offers comprehensive OLE 2.0 support, including object linking, object embedding, drag-and-drop across applications, visual editing and OLE Automation. With full support for OLE 2.0, you can easily integrate Visio Technical drawings into reports, proposals, presentations, spreadsheets and technical documentation created with other Windows applications. And just as easily, you can drop word-processed text or spreadsheet data into your technical drawings. This saves times and eliminates the need to manually re-enter notes, annotation or schedule information into your drawings.

Visio Technician’s extensive implementation of OLE Automation (OLE 2.0’s standard programming interface) provides corporations and solution providers with a powerful way to customize Visio’s features to meet unique needs, and to integrate the program into specific solutions. Integration and compatibility with the Windows desktop means one thing – increased productivity. Visio Technical operates in similar fashion to your other standard Windows applications – lowering training and support costs.

One of the most important (and often overlooked) costs is the training required to ensure that personnel in your company can effectively use the technical drawing software you choose to implement. CAD software typically requires specialized training, and can take three to six months to learn. In contrast, most people are effectively using Visio Technical in just a few days due to its unparalleled ease of use.

Before the introduction of Visio technology, companies had to support many different graphics applications. Business users typically used different graphics software than technical users.

This resulted in higher support costs an incompatibilities between drawing types. Visio is unique in the fact that standard Visio (for business applications) can read and write any drawing created with Visio Technical. The Visio product line allows business users and technical users to use the same graphics engine, which can dramatically lower support costs across your organization.

Visio Technical also facilitates the implementation of corporate drawing standards. SmartShapes can be created that automatically enforce drawing standards, and templates can be defined for standard drawing sizes and title blocks. If your corporate standards change, automatic updating of drawings is made possible by a feature called master shapes. When you create a Visio drawing, every unique shape is an "instance" of a master shape that is stored with the drawing. These master shapes are invisible to the user, but perform an invaluable function. If you don’t need them, you don’t have to know that they’re there. But if a change occurs in your corporate standards and you need to replace one symbol with another, master shapes allow you to automatically substitute one symbol with another throughout your drawing – without making painstaking and inefficient manual changes.

Other features that support the efficient creation of technical drawings include:

• Intelligent connectors. In most technical drawing packages, connections are created by drawing lines between objects. If the user tries to move the objects around, the lines are no longer connected to the objects, and the lines must be redrawn. In Visio Technical, lines automatically stay connected to objects, which is especially important when creating network diagrams, engineering schematics, process flow diagrams, and other technical drawings where critical linkage and flow information is designated by the lines that connect objects together.
• Dimensioning. Visio Technical includes a full set of easy to use drag-and-drop dimensions, including horizontal, vertical, aligned, radial, diameter, angular, baseline, and ordinate dimensions as well as a full set of callouts and labels.
• Support for standard drawing sizes. Visio Technical supports all standard architectural and engineering drawing sizes, including ANSI A through E and ISO A4 through A0, as well as user defined custom sizes.
• Page layering. Users can create and edit "layered" drawings in Visio by linking multiple background pages to a single foreground page. This capability can be used to create standard background and title blocks, or to manage technical drawings with multiple layers of information.

Any shape in Visio Technical can have database information associated with it, such as price, part number, description, or any other relevant information. This allows the automatic generation of bills of materials, parts lists, cost estimates, and asset tracking. Drawings can even be created automatically from databases, eliminating the need to manually create your technical drawings.

In addition, Visio Technical includes a special purpose AutoCAD DWG file converter. Technical professionals needing access to AutoCAD drawing (v2.6 thru R14.01 .DWG or .DXF) files can use Visio Technical to convert these files to Visio drawings, while maintaining the attributes, line types, and blocks of the original drawing.

These capabilities, combined with state-of-the-art OLE support and integration with databases, make Visio Technical the leader in Windows application integration.