With Quarter20 and Onshape, Database-Driven Documentation from Design to Production

Teams that moved to Onshape, PTC’s cloud-native CAD and PDM system, made a deliberate choice. Design data lives in one place, reachable from a browser on any device, always current, with history recorded automatically. Access can be extended to anyone who needs it without buying and provisioning a workstation.

Then a work instruction is needed, and the whole thing is exported to PowerPoint.

That single step gives back most of what the move to the cloud was for – mitigating chaotic file management. Now that document has to be stored somewhere, distributed to whoever needs it, versioned by whatever convention the team has agreed on, and updated by hand every time the design changes. Nothing about it is connected to the model it came from.

For a company committed to operating in the cloud, this is the point where that commitment breaks. Not in design, where the tooling is mature, but in the documentation layer downstream with the assembly work instructions, quality checks, maintenance manuals, parts catalogs, and installation guides that carry engineering data to the people who build, inspect, and service the product.

A digital thread is only as cloud-native as its least cloud-native step.

Quarter20, an Onshape Partner App, removes that step. Together with Onshape, it keeps the entire chain, from design through the documentation that supports it, in the cloud and connected to the same source.

What’s Quarter20?

Quarter20 is a CAD-connected documentation platform built for hardware teams available through the Onshape App Store. It removes the manual work of creating and updating the documents and slides that sit downstream of design.

The Quarter20 plug-in connects your Onshape CAD directly to your documentation. When the design changes, documents update and revision automatically, keeping parts metadata and visuals aligned to the latest approved model.

Benefits of Using Quarter20 with Onshape

Documentation Stays Connected to the Model

When designs change, downstream documentation reflects the latest geometry and details, so screenshots don’t need to be recaptured, and metadata does not need to be re-entered.

Quarter20 also shows every document that references a given CAD file. This means users have an immediate understanding of how design changes impact different documents.

One Library Across Every Document

Parts, tools, and procedures come from shared libraries that stay consistent everywhere they are used. Updating one updates all of them, which removes the need to search across files for every instance and keeps terminology and process consistent between documents.

Faster to create, in one environment. Visual work instructions, quality checks, maintenance manuals, parts catalogs, and installation guides can be built in minutes rather than days, with the whole team working in a single place rather than across several disconnected tools.

Traceability for Regulated Work

Versioned documentation tied to engineering changes lets teams establish what changed and when, which matters where the link between approved design and shop-floor instruction has to be demonstrable. Quarter20 is SOC 2 Type II certified, offers enterprise-grade security and encryption, and is available with an AWS GovCloud deployment option.

How It Works

Once your CAD data is in Quarter20, creating your document is easy.

You can take advantage of a feature that auto-generates assembly order, or choose to build it yourself. As you assemble your operations, the document builds itself alongside you. There is no separate authoring stage, the sequence you define is the document. You can click through each operation step to visualize the assembly of your product, which makes sequencing problems easier to catch before the document is released. Need to add, remove, or re-order steps? The tool is entirely dynamic – your pages will always auto-update.

Quarter20 includes the functionality you would expect in CAD, including exploded views, cross sections, and part highlighting, along with automations that generate them based on your operation steps.

Visuals are produced inside the platform rather than captured from another tool, so they stay tied to the model.

Annotations and Metadata from CAD

You can add whatever annotations a document requires, including callout bubbles, arrows, and shapes.

You can also pull metadata directly from CAD. Because that metadata is pulled from the model rather than typed in, it updates automatically when the model updates. Adding part number metadata to a step, for example, means that part number stays correct without anyone maintaining it.

Tags

Tags connect the entire system.

Everything within a Quarter20 document is tagged from shared libraries – parts, tools, and procedures – and those libraries stay consistent across every document. When you add a text box, you can tag the part it refers to, and tag the tool the procedure requires. Those references become structured objects rather than typed text.

The advantage appears when something changes. If you rename a tag or edit any metadata associated with it, the update applies everywhere that tag is used, across the entire team’s documents.

Every tag is also traceable, so you can see exactly where it is referenced across your library. Before an engineering change is made, you can determine its documentation footprint rather than discovering it afterward.

AI-Powered Documentation Creation

Quarter20 is leveraging the power of AI in two impactful ways.

The first is through the Quarter20 MCP, which provides a path for LLMs to perform direct actions with Quarter20, like automating the entire document creation process or creating content that’s based on previous documentation.

Additionally, Quarter20 documents are optimized for agentic workflows. The tagging systems and CAD connection keep document intent clear so there’s no confusion. In a test, AI agents are 55% more accurate in interpreting instructions when reading Quarter20 documents than standard PDFs.

This aligns with Onshape’s implementation of AI toolsets.

Improving the Digital Thread

Cloud-native CAD removed the file-based friction from design. Applying the same approach to documentation removes it from everything downstream and completes the digital thread rather than stopping it at the point where engineering data has to be turned into instructions for people.