CATIA V5 Win at the Coca-Cola Company

Congratulations to Pete Hajjar and Eduardo Luzzatto-Jiuliani and the rest of the team at Matra Datavision on this win. The Coca-Cola CATIA V5 story is now documented in an IBM reference video.

CATIA V5: Helping Coca-Cola Bring Refreshment to the World
No matter where one travels in the world, people recognize the name Coca-Cola. With its more than 230 brands, including everything from the well-known Coke, Sprite, Fanta, Dasani, and Frutopia names to the more geographic-specific Inca Kola, Kapo, and Thumbs Up brands, Coca-Cola is the world's leading manufacturer, marketer, and distributor of non-alcoholic beverage concentrates and syrups.

One of the challenges for Coca-Cola is packaging its products for sale in everything from a vending machine on the streets of New York City to a small shop in Katmandu. The responsibility for designing all the bottles and cans for Coca-Cola rests with the package development and design group at Coca-Cola headquarters in Atlanta.

Design Complexities lead Coca-Cola to CATIA V5>
Almost as recognizable as the name Coke is the bottle in which it is contained. Behind the scenes, there's a complex process for conceptual design, manufacturing, and filling to bring a bottle to market. A single .5-liter bottle may have 50 variations throughout the world. Why so many variations? Consider the numerous manufacturing facilities located in hundreds of countries--all with different requirements. Add to that different marketing nuances and cultural differences, and you have the need for a family of different bottles with basic design similarities. Coca-Cola has four primary bottle shapes: "contour" for Coke, "ring" for Fanta, "dimple" for Sprite, and "multiproduct" for other Coca-Cola Company brands. In turn, these variations have spawned more than 3,000 different packaging designs for soft drinks, fruit juices, bottled water, and sports drinks.

Sterling Steward, design team leader, describes what the package development and design group, consisting of three computer-aided design (CAD) designers and two industrial designers, is up against. "Some of the challenges faced by the design group are very complex sculptured surfaces," he says. "In the past, glass containers, pressure vessels, in particular, were very round, very simple shapes. With the new age coming aboard, we're looking for more complex shapes, more creativity in the packaging, which means even higher-end surfacing capabilities. We need to be able to generate and highlight outlines on the packages with complex surfaces. Indentations, as well as protrusions, blown lettering, and graphics would actually be blown into a lot of packages, PET (plastic bottles) as well as glass.

"In considering high-end CAD packages, the package development and design group was looking for software with strong surfacing capability, which could also handle the variations quickly. When marketing reviews a new package design, there could be anywhere from half a dozen to 100 full 3D models generated as concepts for review and testing. It's to Coca-Cola's benefit for the design group to develop the concepts in full 3D models. That way, once marketing reaches a decision, the turnaround time to go into production tooling is dramatically reduced. CATIA V5's ability to design with or without parametrics was very important to Coca-Cola. When asked about the advantages of CATIA V5 John Wargo, Designer in the Product Development and Design group not only listed the powerful surfacing capabilities but also "the ability to parametrically drive your models and the ability to control your models with mathematical equations". With CATIA V5 the design group can create a basic design and then develop multiple variations in a few minutes time.

Additional Benefits of CATIA V5
Another key consideration is the sharing of information internally and externally. Coca-Cola wanted a software platform that would not only let designers collaborate with one another, but that was compatible with what its suppliers and tooling vendors use. Jay Gouliard, Director of Package Development and Design made this clear in stating "the CATIA software - it is a software platform compatible with what our suppliers use and with what some of our tooling vendors use, so it makes it easy for us to translate drawings from vendor to supplier to other bottle manufacturers around the world and allows us to communicate the new designs to the field very quickly and very efficiently." CATIA V5 fits well with the processed created by Coca-Cola for working with the package engineers from around the world as well as their suppliers and vendors. Coca-Cola has a Lotus Notes application, which tracks and manages the workflow associated with requests for new packages that could come from package engineer anywhere in the world. The Package Development and Design group uses this application to transfer pdf and dxf files of the drawings IGES for the 3D parts, and rendered images. They use the system to communicate status and gain approvals from the originator as well as patent, trademark, engineering and marketing. All the essential elements of the package development process are linked together via Lotus Notes.

The packaging development and product design group's adoption of CATIA V5 coincided with its migration from the Unix hardware platform to Microsoft Windows NT. Steward explains that cutbacks on employees dedicated to internal support for Unix made keeping that platform difficult. While Coca-Cola's corporate information technology group was willing to pick up the support slack, it was only willing to do so for Windows NT systems, due to Coca-Cola's corporate-wide use of the Windows platforms. Thus, moving to Windows NT translated into less overhead costs and gained productivity for the group. Says Steward: "This [move] dramatically cut our maintenance cost for a year's worth of maintenance on hardware." Because of internal changes within the Package Development and Design group it was important that the conversion to using CATIA V5 be done quickly and with designers new to the group. CATIA V5's ease-of-use was demonstrated as described by John Wargo, "It's a fairly straight forward package. The icons are pretty straightforward to figure out. It was intuitive. Things were where you would guess them to be. It was a fairly easy transition for me" Productivity and efficiency is important to Coca-Cola. Sterling Steward stated "Over the last ten to fifteen years, Coke has increased its design capabilities three times with one-third as many people. This is primarily due to the introduction of CAD and we're looking to continue this increase of productivity with the introduction of CATIA V5.

Michael Robinaugh
IBM Product Lifecycle Management Solutions
Engineering Marketing Specialist
2900 Charlevoix Dr SE, Grand Rapids, MI 49546
616.942.3896 (TL 896-3896) Fax 616.942.3847

Jenbacher Decreases Development Time

Jenbacher is a major manufacturer of remote cogeneration plants that supply electricity and heat at decentralized locations around the world. They design and build gas cogeneration systems that offer the highest efficiency of energy conversion. Jenbacher engineers use PLM tools to experiment "virtually" with various fuels and engine designs to exploit nontraditional sources of energy. This new process has allowed Jenbacher to bring new efficiency breakthroughs to market in less than a year and reduce development time by 35 percent.

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