CHALLENGE
Companies in the food and beverage industry must strike a delicate balance. They need to provide sustainable packaging, ensure regulatory compliance and meet ever-changing consumer demands – while making sure they can deliver projects on time and on budget. To achieve that, it is critical to ensure real-time insights into the data and contextual knowledge required to make decisions during the packaging development process.
SOLUTION
To enable those insights, a leading global company needed to unify structured and unstructured data that existed across separate systems. This would create a single set of actionable data perspectives that were tightly integrated into its development platform. It chose NETVIBES data science solutions on the Dassault Systèmes 3DEXPERIENCE platform to bring that vision to life.
BENEFITS
Innovation is accelerated as packaging developers can search for projects with similar attributes and reuse successful elements, including pallet design and certification. Guidance on next steps, with associated data and documents to hand, helps to optimize project efficiency. This has improved “first time right” packaging decisions and reduced the need for costly re-engineering efforts, delivering a potential 30% increase in packaging development efficiency.
Pioneering Packaging
In the fast-moving, highly competitive food and beverage industry, market leadership is as much about bottles, cans and boxes as the products inside them. Designs are refreshed increasingly often as companies strive to delight consumers – and as well as looking good, they must also be fit for purpose.
For one global leader in this industry, innovative bottle design goes hand in hand with exceptional quality and sustainability. As well as being visually appealing and pleasant to hold, each bottle must also be sustainable, made from recycled and recyclable materials. The lighter the bottle is, the more it will help to reduce carbon emissions, but it also needs to be strong enough to withstand shocks. The way the bottles will fit onto a pallet for transportation is also a critical factor. A competitive edge comes from combining all these elements in a way that is cost-effective and can be produced fast enough to beat competitors to market.
The company knew that it had volumes of data from previous package designs that could provide a rich source of information for new ones. If packaging designers could reuse that information, they would be able to innovate faster, replicate past successes and make sure failures weren’t repeated – while reducing the amount of physical testing needed to get the design to market. However, these valuable resources were scattered across different systems and network drives. Developers would struggle to find the knowledge they needed – if they knew it was there at all.
Digitalizing its development processes held the key for the company to overcome these obstacles. It wanted to bring all its data together in one place and make it easy for packaging engineers to search, access and understand.
“To become even faster, stronger and better, we are constantly looking for ways to improve how we design packaging, and digitization will be a key element of how we achieve this,” said a beverage packaging lead at the food and beverage provider. “My vision is an integrated packaging development system – a digital workflow which automatically guides all packaging developers through the right steps in the process, provides them with the right digital tools and simulations to be able to quickly assess and evaluate packaging, and enables them to mine the huge data history we’ve accumulated over the years.”
The company chose NETVIBES data science solutions, on the 3DEXPERIENCE platform from Dassault Systèmes, to make that vision a reality.
My vision is […] a digital workflow which automatically guides all packaging developers through the right steps in the process, provides them with the right digital tools and simulations to be able to quickly assess and evaluate packaging, and enables them to mine the huge data history we’ve accumulated over the years.
Beverage Packaging Lead
Shifting from Physical to Digital
Packaging design involves a lot of prototyping and testing. Carrying out this work with physical objects takes a lot of time and materials, as well as generating significant waste. By shifting the emphasis away from physical processes towards digital ones, the organization would be able to accelerate innovation and improve its sustainability performance.
To digitalize its packaging development, the company needed to harmonize data across the value chain. This would allow different teams to work on the same virtual model, using past and present design data to develop, simulate and test new bottles. It chose the 3DEXPERIENCE platform to support that shift after a proof-of-value project showed it could deliver a 30% increase in packaging development efficiency.
As well as uniting virtual and real-world digital data, the platform allows the company to create a virtual twin for each packaging design and integrate upstream and downstream tools and systems. This means that users across the value chain can access the virtual model of each design and see how their decisions fit into the bigger picture. Engineers can use it to run predictive simulations early in the design process, so they make the right decisions and reduce the need for line tests.
“It’s important to have a single entry-point to access all the simulation software tools and models,” said the company’s director of data science and analytics. “The 3DEXPERIENCE platform does that and enables businesses to collaborate, connect and scale.”
The 3DEXPERIENCE platform […] enables businesses to collaborate, connect and scale.
Director of Data Science and Analytics
A Head-Start on New Designs
Data is only useful if it is searchable, understandable and actionable in the context each user needs. NETVIBES data science solutions make that possible by visualizing data from systems across the organization in the platform. This helps to optimize innovation in several ways.
At the start of a new design project, the solution provides intelligent search capabilities so designers can search using structured data or unstructured data. By viewing the information in context, they are better able to make decisions that will improve product quality while saving time and money.
For example, 3D geometric search allows the packaging design engineer to match their new design with similar shaped bottles that already exist across the company’s brands. They can then select the closest matches and compare specific attributes, to see where close similarities could allow them to reuse existing data – such as the materials used, pallet pattern and certification.
All this knowledge is accessed in one place so designers can review it, understand how successful the measures were and decide whether to reuse them for the new bottle. If the answer is yes, then they can quickly create a project using all the relevant content from previous projects, including component materials, engineering bill of materials, suppliers and reference documents. Then they can simply modify these elements as part of their new design. This cuts out a lot of research, trial and error early in the design process, helping to get the foundations right and prevent problems later.
Intelligent Project Execution
Innovation may start with a new idea, but its success depends on how efficiently the project can be brought to market. That efficiency gets a significant boost when all the relevant data is available at engineers’ fingertips.
For instance, running deliverables reports on past projects allows users to quickly find and reuse associated data linked to specific tasks. This helps them understand exactly what happened and when, including any issues, risks and budget involved, so they can reuse the successful parts and avoid any pitfalls.
Essentially, the company now has a system that can enhance the project’s efficiency by coaching its users team every step of the way. Everything they need, including deliverables, status and associated documentation, can be accessed from a single dashboard. They can drag and drop tasks from their to-do list to “in process” or “completed” fields. And instead of hunting among directories for the information they need – or assuming it doesn’t exist – they can instantly access the relevant templates to complete tasks like ship-and-stack tests, quickly and accurately.
Powering the Future of Packaging
For the food and beverage company, NETVIBES has already delivered significant value. It provides a unified view of data from different systems that allows development teams to search, understand and reuse information embedded across the value chain in an intuitive way. Stronger, more informed decisions have resulted, as lessons learned from past designs and physical tests are seamlessly woven into new projects.
With a fully digital, integrated packaging development system to work with, packaging engineers can now focus their time on true innovation work. This is enabling them to bring exciting, customer-centric packaging ideas to market faster, while hitting quality targets and optimizing cost. In fact, the company is looking at design efficiency gains of 30%.
This is also a solution that will power the packaging innovations of the future. By digitally accelerating innovation, the company believes that it will also allow research and development teams to work on larger projects around processing and packaging. Ultimately, it believes the technology has the flexibility, scalability and interoperability to provide an end-to-end platform that connects its R&D to the supply chain.
“We are delighted to have helped our customer achieve its vision of an intuitive and optimized bottle development process, which was not possible with its existing technology,” said Morgan Zimmermann, CEO of Dassault Systèmes NETVIBES. “The company challenged us to be forward thinking, to understand its packaging engineers’ decision-making processes and to prove the value of our solution every step of the way. In response, we provided relevant use cases that accelerated the timeline for solution adoption and delivered immediate value.”
We are delighted to have helped our customer achieve its vision of an intuitive and optimized bottle development process, which was not possible with its existing technology. We provided relevant use cases that accelerated the timeline for solution adoption and delivered immediate value.
Morgan Zimmermann, CEO of Dassault Systèmes NETVIBES
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Brand content creator on the NETVIBES Marketing team