My earlier post, “Perfect Packages: At The Forefront of Simulation,” explains how simulation is helping consumer packaged goods companies decrease costs, reduce the risk of product failures, and become more sustainable. In this post, I’ll discuss the fundamental values a business platform enables, as well as peruse future simulation trends!
There are many benefits for a company when they are able to integrate the virtual testing phase of the development process as part of their entire business practice. From a simulation perspective, this means that when a virtual test shows unsatisfying results, it is possible to:
- Look at which requirements are impacted.
- Determine which designer to contact to request a change.
- Understand how manufacturing is impacted down the line.
Decision makers are able to access lightweight simulation results from a web browser and understand the reasons for the need to change a design, the impact on environment, and also the cost and visual appearance.
Enhanced Collaboration
One of the fundamental values enabled by implementing a business platform is increased collaboration. If we look specifically at the Design and Simulation worlds, having a common platform for managing and accessing data enables analysts to easily reuse CAD data for their simulation inputs, even if a design changes.
One growing trend we see and actively contribute to is the democratization of simulation—how simulation technology is made accessible to communities of users with varying levels of simulation expertise, such as designers.
With a platform, simulation experts are able to develop methods directly with their tools and deploy them to users with less advanced simulation skills (in the past this was done through the manual printing and distributing of documents). Experts can now focus their attention on more challenging physics problems like modeling advanced material behaviors or understanding the impact of emerging technologies, such as 3D-printing.
For non-expert simulation users in the Consumer Packaged Goods industry (sometimes referred to as practitioners), some of the required modeling and analysis methods can be easily captured and applied to a wide range of bottle designs with limited user input. A bottle designer can then explore the design space by leveraging these methods, as well as using design exploration tools and cloud computing. It is then possible to review hundreds of bottle designs and quickly determine which design will perform best. Furthermore, an understanding of the behavior of a single design will be accessible within a matter of minutes—if not seconds—to practitioners.
A Glimpse Into the Future
There are many ways simulation could become pervasive beyond the world of product development. Advances in visualization, as well as virtual and augmented reality, give the opportunity to experience accurate behaviors of packaging designs in an increasing number of environments. For example, I had the opportunity to view a bottle drop model through Microsoft HoloLens glasses. Simply put the device on, select a surface in your real environment (such as your desk), and watch the virtual bottle as it falls!
I have no doubt that realistic rendering and the ongoing development effort to apply this technology to simulation results will soon be accessible in an augmented reality environment to engineers, decision makers, and consumers within the Consumer Packaged Goods industry. It will ultimately provide an experience that not only mimics reality, but enhances it with the insights derived from simulation technology.
The ability to visualize what a package would look like on a shelf while staying in the virtual world is already invaluable for companies in this industry. Now imagine the significance of experiencing an accurate representation of how that same package would behave!
Watch this video of a bottle drop as viewed through HoloLens glasses:
