Ring Can Corp., one of the fastest growing container companies in North America, faces a daunting challenge: how to design and produce the lightest and most attractive plastic containers in the food and personal care industry -- without compromising package performance.

The company's customers include such giants as Procter & Gamble and Cargill. In this industry, a typical grocery store stocks more than 10,000 different products, and some large superstores up to 25,000 products. Proper positioning and getting noticed on the shelves is incredibly important, so manufacturers are experimenting more and more with new package designs. On top of that, products come and go much more quickly than ever before. Consequently, manufacturers want faster product design cycles.

To leverage its product expertise more effectively and keep up with customer demands, Ring Can has been using VX's CAD/CAM software.

"VX software has made the design process much easier and faster," said Doug Dygert, product development engineer with Ring Can. "It's user-friendly, easy-to-learn, and provides a great combination of new advanced functions that give you convenience and absolute control when designing the model."

Using the example of a bottle designed to hold cooking oil, Dygert said, "Plastic bottles may look very straightforward, but design difficulties arise from the shape of the bottle. Most bottles incorporate a sculptured look to enhance shelf appeal. So as a designer, I want to switch from solids to surfaces to get blends and transitions. With VX software, it's easy to go back and forth between solids and surfaces, or to make a surface and then blend it into a solid."

Dygert believes that VX software has significantly reduced his and Ring Can's design cycle time. "The VX parametrics work differently from those in other programs," he said. "Because adjusting for changing volume is critical in plastic bottles, you need some way to make changes quickly. In VX software, you can make changes at any point in the history and have the change carry through the rest of subsequent history. I often find this capability necessary to make sure of overflow capacities -- a process that requires extensive experimentation."

In the past, after finding out what a customer wanted, Dygert would draw designs in 2D, send the sketch to the customer and repeat that process until the customer was satisfied. That could take up to a week. Dygert can now do a complete design in a day most of the time. He then e-mails the IGES file to the mold shop and has a prototype in three days.

"VX software has helped cut the design cycle by at least half," continued Dygert. "We get cost savings proportional to the time we save. Quality has improved as well, because the mold maker can create the exact mold for a particular bottle right from the designs produced using VX software. We're moving to the new Version 4 VX software, where we can place images directly onto a surface from a picture. For example, with an electronic image of a cat, we can emboss a cat directly on the surface of a cat litter container for one of our customers."

"Companies looking for a way to more quickly create complex, higher quality products to help them succeed in today's extremely competitive markets now have an easy-to-use solution: CAD/CAM software from VX," said Bob Fischer, vice president of sales and marketing at VX. "We're pleased that VX has helped Ring Can Corporation to achieve this goal."