Japan-based Lion Corporation has chosen IBM and Dassault Systèmes' product lifecycle management (PLM) solutions to design and develop detergent containers that are both environmentally friendly and increase customer satisfaction.

Lion is a leading consumer goods company in Asia that sells hygiene and beauty products, household detergent, and cleaning products. The company also operates in the chemical and pharmaceutical areas. Lion's packaging design team will be using Catia V5, the world's leading 3D product-development application, to design and develop detergent containers. Catia V5 is an IBM PLM solution developed by Dassault Systèmes.

Thanks to Catia V5's extensive surfacing capabilities, generative design strategies, analysis tools, and Digital Mock-up functionalities, Lion will be able to combine green design and ergonomic packaging harmoniously and easily. The different teams involved in package design will be able to work together in one seamless, end-to-end product development environment.

Using Catia V5's digital prototype capabilities, Lion also will be able, at an early stage, to improve the design and attributes of its containers by re-using previous product development data and reducing errors. It will use fewer raw materials and make fewer physical prototypes, allowing more concepts to be explored while at the same time increasing innovation. With PLM solutions, Lion will be able to cut container development costs and prototypes development time by 50% and accelerate its development cycle while increasing customer satisfaction.

With Catia V5's multidiscipline collaborative environment, all parties involved in Lion's cross-functional teams - from engineering, manufacturing and suppliers to marketing and sales - will be able to improve future generations of products on demand as customers' expectations evolve.

"To succeed in the highly competitive household products market in Japan, we think that our company needs to speed up all of its corporate processes," says Shigeru Hirata, director of the Packaging Engineering Department at Lion. "In particular, container design is seen as a key factor for products and is so important that it could be called a 'silent salesman'. Given this, we sought a system with the capacity to greatly enhance our design process. From here on out, through collaboration with IBM and Dassault Systèmes, we are confident that we will be able to accomplish this task."

"IBM PLM Solutions have brought our customers concrete business benefits for more than two decades," says Junichi Takeuchi, PLM director, Asia Pacific, IBM. "Lion's example is a proof point showing that our PLM solutions can also benefit the consumer goods industry. It can help them be environmentally responsible while enabling them to create key differentiating and leading products."

"The deployment of V5 PLM solutions at Lion is a breakthrough for the consumer goods industry because it gives all functions in the enterprise access to correct information around package engineering, thus enabling concurrent marketing," says Christian Nardin, managing director, Dassault Systèmes Asia. "This revolutionary container design process, which digitally incorporates and validates consumer preferences, engineering constraints, and manufacturability, as well as the friendliness of packaging to users and the environment, all in 3D, puts Lion one step ahead of its competitors in terms of sustainable development."

For more information contact Igal Filipovski, CDC, 011 786 3516, www.cdcsa.co.za