It doesn’t take too many web searches or too much channel surfing on TV to read or hear a story about virtual reality or virtual simulation. Usually these stories detail how the latest video games will be played, or how spacecraft will land on Mars, or how surgeries are being performed remotely. But interestingly enough, another industry is being enhanced with virtual technology – the Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) industry.
As companies are hunting for innovative ways to save costs, they have turned their eyes to technology to facilitate their efforts. Three companies, specifically, have found virtual simulation from Dassault Systèmes as a key lever in their search for dollars.
Saint-Gobain is the world’s second largest glass bottle and jar manufacturer. They were looking for ways to use less packaging materials in their glass bottles. In the past, many companies would manufacture multiple prototypes and test them to determine how much stress their packaging could take (in shipping, handling, conveyance) when they made it with less material. Kind of like the old joke of how they determine weight limits on bridges….they drive heavier and heavier trucks over it until it breaks and then they rebuild the bridge and put up the sign. It’s not very efficient, but it can be effective. Saint-Gobain was able to use virtual simulation from Dassault Systèmes to determine exactly how much material could be taken out of the bottles and still withstand the same physical forces.
“In the case of the hard-cider bottle, we were able to reduce weight by 10 percent and stress on the critical bottom region by about 17 percent. In the past, it might have taken us a week to run the 100 simulations needed for this optimization. But now with an iterative looped process, it only takes about an hour.”
– Xavier Brajer, Saint-Gobain Mechanical Engineer
Similarly, Amcor found virtual simulation as a way to go lean on materials through virtual simulation. One of the largest PET (a type of plastic) containers for consumer goods in the world, Amcor was able to use virtual simulation to reduce design cycle times by 50% and lower the number of physical prototypes they were building (fewer bridges!). They used virtual simulation to reduce the total amount of resin in manufacturing by 60,000 metric tons…..which translates to millions of dollars in savings.
And Plastic Technologies Inc. (PTI), a leader in plastic packaging design services, uses virtual simulation to lower development costs, achieve faster time-to-market on product launches and improve design and production trouble-shooting.
All three companies are using simulation for ‘Better, faster, cheaper.’ If you want to understand the ‘virtual’ journey their products went on, please explore the interactive infographic, “Journey to the Shelf”. It features several videos to demonstrate how simulation technology can be used to make your innovation plans more efficient.
