Our children have grown up enjoying regular visits to the town of Frankenmuth Michigan. Frankenmuth is a Bavarian themed town in Mid-Michigan originally settled by Germans from the Franconia region of Bavaria which is also, the home of Wenzel America’s parent company. At the heart of the town is a sprawling German themed hotel that is proud of its heritage with rooms named after the German families that originally settled the town as immigrants to the new world.
The Bavarian Inn is a quality establishment and it projects that message of quality throughout everything it does and everything it provides its guests. Nowhere is this message more obvious than in the quality of their water bottles.
Bottled water from the Bavarian Inn comes in bottles so superior to the regular ones, they are refillable and reusable and remain in new condition for months if required. I have one with me all the time as I work and continue refilling and reusing them for months.
Just holding and feeling the bottle, it is obviously a superior product but what is it that makes one product feel so much better than another? How can you put numbers to a feeling and evaluate where the differences lie? This is a challenging question for anyone in product design that needs to understand the factors contributing to an end-user’s perception of product quality.
In my privileged position in charge of the Wenzel America CT department I can use the tools at my disposal to understand what it is that makes the Bavarian Inn water bottle so superior. Scanning both a Bavarian Inn bottle and a regular one to compare it to is remarkably simple with a Wenzel exaCT CT machine.
All that is required is to put the bottle on a styrofoam fixture and set the power setting; Everything after that is automatic. After Scanning the bottles, I have tools that allow me to measure exactly what makes for a better bottle such as being able to do a wall thickness analysis over the whole bottle. This shows show that the wall thickness of the Bavarian Inn bottle averages 50% thicker all around and twice as thick in key places.
It is this additional material that gives the bottle it’s durability and firm quality feel in the hand CT Scanning also allow inspection of the internal working of the cap on the bottle and in the attached pictures you can clearly see the superior construction of the cap and the more substantial thread on the bottle.
Any product designer or development engineer “Benchmarking” their competition or updating a successful design of their own can have access to the same technology to fully understand the factors that distinguish a quality product. Give me a call. To find out more about contract CT inspection click here.