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First of all, I'd like to thank those who responded to my query: David
Locke, Jim Grey, Don Timmerman, Michele Marques, Sonja Waller and Ruby
Jaggernath.
If anyone has anything to add to the summary below, I would appreciate any
additional information. The marketing part has pretty much been covered (for
my needs at least). As I mentioned previously, the documents that I am
working with are both marketing and technical. They are used for marketing
purposes and are our primary sales tools, however they are full of specs and
drawings and are used mainly by engineers and the like to make their
specific purchase decisions. In other words, they are not used to determine
that they want to buy *something* from our company, but that they want to
buy motor X with holding torque Y, rotor inertia Z, gear ratio A, etc. and
specific dimensions so that it fits with their existing equipment or the
equipment they are designing.
One thing that I'm looking for specifically (and there are some suggestions
below which I haven't yet investigated) is a sort of style book that would
tell me proper terms and abbreviations, e.g., is it a "controller" or an
"indexer", "oz-in" or "oz.in.". etc.
Many of the suggestions that I received focussed on the Marketing part of my
query and should prove helpful. These included:
* know your competitors, their products and their documention
* read up on marketing communications, specifications, integrated marketing
communications databases and tech writing in general (try Geoffrey Moore's
books on the technology adoption cycle, _Inside the Tornado_ and _Crossing
the Chasm_, as well as Regis McKinna [spelling?] and Guerilla marketing
[Levinson] books)
More manufacturing-specific suggestions included:
* check out APICS, the Educational Society for Resource Management, at
www.apics.org
* learn about ISO 9000 quality standards (either through ISO publications or
courses)
Also having searched the archives, I found the following suggestions (with
credit to George Mena and L.H. Garlinghouse):
* good reference books include: Machinery's Handbook and MIL-D-1000 (or
DOD-STD-100) Engineering Drawing Practices; also MIL-STD-12 for standard
terms and abbreviations of the Department of Defense
* where to get industry and military specs and standards:
1. www.doccenter.com
The Document Center
111 Industrial Road
Belmont, CA
(650) 591-7600
2. Information Handling Services, Englewood (or Inglewood?), CO
3. optics.org/oo/optical_standards/milspec.html
*************************
Erin Kampf
Technical Publications Coordinator
Oriental Motor USA Corp.
Tel: (310) 784-8211
