Bridging CAD to Work Instructions on the Floor

I keep seeing our CAD stop at engineering, then screenshots get pasted into Word for the line. In medical device assembly that hurts us twice: clarity suffers and every ECO turns into a hunt to update static images.

We piloted lightweight 3D instructions at a few stations (simple viewer, guided steps, explode states). Training time dropped and orientation errors went down. The snags: keeping views truly linked to the MBOM and revision, slow viewer startup on rugged PCs, and operators don’t want to navigate a model. They want the next step, one click, big text.

What helped: drive callouts from metadata, lock each step to a saved view that only shows needed parts, and auto-build the package on ECO via a script tied to PLM. We still struggle with validation burden for the viewer in a GMP environment and IT overhead.

If you’ve made CAD the single source for floor-ready instructions, what stack worked? Composer/Illustrate/Inventor Publisher, web viewers, 3D PDFs? How did you validate the tool and keep performance acceptable on the floor without buying workstations for every station?