Coca-Cola - New Frontiers with CATIA

With more than 230 Coca-Cola brands worldwide, the containers are an important part of this company's brand image. The responsibility for designing bottles and cans belongs to the Package Development and Design group. The process is complex when managing the 50 variations of a single product container due to different manufacturing and distribution centers, marketing nuances and cultural differences across the globe.

The company today is looking for more complex shapes and creativity in the packaging. Designers and management wanted to incorporate highlight outlines, indentations, protrusions, blown lettering and graphics. The trend is moving away from very round, simple shapes.

Coca-Cola decided to migrate from Euclid to CATIA V5 with the key objective of reducing their design execution phase - modeling, drafting and image generation - so they could focus more time on packaging innovations. With the help of EADS Matra Datavision, a custom Web-based application was deployed. The designer can enter a few key parameters, like shape, height, diameter, and volume, to quickly generate 3D CATIA models and drawings.

Critical to this process is CATIA V5's ability to design with or without parametrics. John Wargo, a designer in the Package Development and Design group said, "the ability to parametrically drive your models and the ability to control your models with mathematical equations is a huge advantage to the designer." Coca-Cola's goal for the Web-based application is for someone with little or no CAD experience to accomplish in minutes what use to take a designer many hours. The key to reaching their goal is CATIA V5's next generation technology, open architecture, Web accessibility and scripting capabilities.

In considering CAD packages, the Package Development and Design group was looking for software with strong surfacing capabilities, able to handle variations quickly. When marketing reviews a new package design, up to 100 full 3D models may be generated for review and testing. 3D models are preferred for conceptual review, so that once marketing reaches a decision, the turnaround time to go into production tooling is dramatically reduced.

Coca-Cola also wanted a software platform that could easily share information internally and externally. Management wanted to enable designers to collaborate with each other and be fully compatible with the systems its suppliers and tooling vendors were using. CATIA was found to be a design tool that was easy for the designers to learn, with on-the-job training provided by Matra. CATIA also demonstrated that as a software platform it is compatible with the systems used by suppliers and tooling vendors, making it easy to translate drawings from vendor to supplier or other bottle manufacturers very quickly and efficiently.

You are encouraged to attend the fascinating COE Spring 2002 plenary session to hear Coca-Cola describe in further detail their strategic and tactical experiences in making the move to CATIA V5.