New package design can take eighteen months to two years. By the time the product is ready the market has moved on. Worse, development is a disjointed affair. The labelling team don’t know what the design team or the materials team are working on.
When the prototype is ready the manufacturing department shrug and say the new shape isn’t really suited to the production line. And the materials aren’t right. Iterating designs is expensive, slow, frustrating and leads to sub-optimal products.
The answer is to switch from physically making prototypes to a virtual environment. The Dassault Systèmes suite of software, collectively known as the Perfect Package 3DEXPERIENCE, offers an integrated journey stretching from the conception and ideas stage of concept development, through detailed modelling and refinement, via artwork and labelling, to technical qualification and consumer validation. A change made by one team can be seen instantly by colleagues at every stage of the design process.
The result? Design time is cut in half. Material cost can be cut by 30 to 50 per cent. And packaging related recalls and quality issues can be virtually eliminated.
The Perfect Package 3DEXPERIENCE offers tools to accelerate the process at every stage. Take the design phase. Technical engineers can access and import the ideas and specifications drawn up by colleagues earlier in the concept development process. The engineers can also choose between a vast array of pre-existing templates or create from scratch.
The answer is to switch from physically making prototypes to a virtual environment
These models can be tweaked and refined using Dassault Systèmes’ 3D Digital Product Experience, included in the Perfect Package. It offers a vast library of materials, from glasses and plastics, to cardboards and metals.
And when the design looks ready, simulation tools can subject the prototype to real-world scenarios. Will the product tip over? How much pressure can it handle? It is crazy to wait until the manufacturing process to examine whether a plastic bottle has the necessary rigidity to dispense its contents as required. The simulation process from Perfect Package allows you to improve the performance of a design without needing to physically create dozens of versions.
Naturally, designs cannot be produced without reference to manufacturing capabilities. So the Perfect Package 3DEXPERIENCE allows prototypes to be evaluated with close reference to those capabilities. How will products flow down a production line? How convenient is it to shape a particular glass section? What are the implications of paper carton manufacture? Can the contents of each product be inserted with the minimum of fuss?
These questions gets answered during the Perfect Package 3DEXPERIENCE journey, ensuring the final product is green, cost-efficient, structurally and aesthetically optimised, and is a joy to the people who have the honoured task of turning it into a physical reality, filling, then distributing it, and one day in the distant future, recycling it.
The Perfect Package 3DEXPERIENCE drastically stretches beyond the immediate realm of design. It offers a platform for mass participation in the brainstorming of packaging ideas. It seamlessly weaves in customer feedback data and historic sales data. Instead of each department – marketing, design, technical, management, purchasing – all working independently, the Perfect Package 3DEXPERIENCE pulls them together into one unified team.
This is why Procter & Gamble, Coca-Cola, MWV, Tetra Pak and thousands of other world-class firms rely on the Perfect Package. You have five to eight seconds to capture the attention and win the custom of a shopper. The Perfect Package 3DEXPERIENCE means you’ll have the maximum chance of winning that sale.
