Lattice Technology and Chapter 13

When you read a news item whose headline contains a company’s name followed by Chapter 13 you pretty much know that the news is bad. That was my first impression when I quickly glanced at the title of a press release that ended up in my inbox a short while ago – “Lattice Technology Releases Chapter 13 of its New Lean Manufacturing Book“. The title caught my attention, as maybe did the title of this post. I sat upright, read the press release and was pleased to find out that news was good.

The press release is actually the announcement of the release of the final chapter of a book written by Dr. Hiroshi Toriya, the President and CEO of Lattice Technology. The company has been regularly releasing chapters of this book for some time now. Two chapters every month starting May of this year. The book is titled “Improving Lean Manufacturing Through 3D Data“. According to the web site:

This 13 chapter book delivers in-depth studies of companies including Toyota, Brother Industries, Alpine Precision, and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, to name but a few, as they create and innovate processes that use 3D in downstream manufacturing. Other chapters deliver vital resources on the challenges manufacturers are facing, and how Japanese manufacturers are planning to overcome them.

The target audience of this free e-book is manufacturing executives and educators and is primarily focused on improving existing manufacturing processes. I guess there is nobody better than the Japanese to learn that from.

For those who don’t know what Lattice Technology does:

With Lattice Technology’s Solutions, engineers and manufacturers can perform design review, simulate assembly processes, automate creation of 3D parts lists / BOM’s and create animations with even the largest 3D assemblies. Lattice’s standards based XVL (eXtensible Virtual world description Language) technology provides secure, highly accurate and compressed 3D files that can be used, shared and easily supported by partners, suppliers, and internal departments in a lightweight browser-based solution.

Basically, they have created this patented XVL file format which has the ability to accurately compress 3D data to about 0.5% of its original size. Then they have various solutions for Design Review, Kinematics Simulation, Production Planning, etc. that revolve around this XVL file format. You can get more information about their XVL technology here.

Note: You need to register to receive the free e-book. I just downloaded my copy of the 17 MB, 159 page e-book.