Subscribe For Free! Sign up to receive the print magazine six times per year and the e-mail newsletter twice a month. Learn more >
Pharmaceutical company packaging OEE's (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) are reported to be among the lowest in the industry. Experience teaches that those feeling the greatest amount of pain are the ones most likely to successfully drive change. Perhaps that is why three giant pharmaceutical companies reported on their efforts in this area at ARC's Forum on Winning Strategies and Best Practices for Global Manufacturers.
Watch for pharmaceutical manufacturers to employ robotics more frequently to boost efficiencies throughout their processing and packaging operations. “We may be ‘OnTheEdge’ of a major growth spurt for robotics on North American packaging lines,” notes Keith Campbell, consultant and OnTheEdgeBlog.com blogger. “Mechatronics and robotics are two ‘disruptive technologies’ that have the potential to transform the development of packaging equipment,” adds Ben Miyares, vice president of industry relations for the Packaging Machinery Manufacturers Institute.
We may be OnTheEdge of a major growth spurt for robotics on North American packaging lines. That is what some, including Ben Miyares of Packaging Machinery Manufacturers Institute (PMMI), reported at a robotics conference held over the weekend leading up to Pack Expo in Las Vegas last autumn. I think that this is great news for packagers! Robots can provide highly flexible automation options and mitigate capital risk on new lines that may be installed to support the launch of finicky new products. I'm not as confident that the news is as good for the robot manufacturers. While I would expect them to experience a portion of this growth, packaging machinery manufacturers have several options for bringing robotic functionality to end-users.
Synchronized lines, rather than individual pieces of equipment, will be a focus of pharmaceutical manufacturers, predicts PMMI’s Ben Miyares. In this exclusive Q&A interview with Healthcare Packaging, Miyares addresses multiple healthcare packaging-related issues, including mechatronics and robotics, which, he says, "have the potential to transform the development of packaging equipment." He also looks at sustainability, packaging equipment purchase considerations, E-machinery, and counterfeiting topics.
Pharmaceutical firms seek packaging line improvements to cut costs, biologics present packaging challenges, and medical device growth is driven by aging baby boomers. These treatment advances bode well for the healthcare/life sciences packaging community. Packaging materials need to offer protection from point of manufacture to the “last mile” where healthcare products reach a patient. Packaging materials must provide barriers for moisture, oxygen, light and heat, and they may include overt and/or covert security measures to combat counterfeiting and diversion. Equipment will need to package products more efficiently, be validatable and versatile.
Healthcare Packaging and Packaging World, producers of the Pharmaceutical Packaging Forum, and Ipack-Ima Spa, organizers of Pharmintech, announce a cooperative agreement in which Healthcare Packaging and Packaging World will offer promotional support to Ipack-Ima Spa, increasing the visibility for their Italian trade event, Pharmintech, to the U.S. pharmaceutical market. Pharmintech, held every three years in Italy, will next take place May 12th -14th, 2010 in Bologna, Italy.
Nowhere in packaging are flexibility and fast changeover more necessary than in the contract-packaging arena, where multiple customers and their many SKUs are a fact of life. That’s why ease of changeover was a key machine characteristic sought by Brecon Pharmaceuticals recently when it came time to install a new line for blister packing and cartoning of tablets. This fast-growing contract packager, acquired last year by Amerisource Bergen, is located in the UK near the town of Brecon, Wales. Both thermoforming and cold-forming of foil are routinely done on this new and highly versatile blister-pack line.
In this question-and-answer interview, Andrew Billington (shown), operations manager at Brecon Pharmaceuticals in Wales, addresses recent trends in packaging. What is he looking for in new packaging machinery? Billington says: "Quicker changeover and anything that facilitates GMPs [Good Manufacturing Practices] are at the top of the list. Both are especially important for a contract packager because our runs can be quite short. Added changeover pressure can also come from the multiple languages we deal with here in Europe. That’s something our counterparts in the United States do not have to face."
At a biomedical facility in Ireland, machine automation is coming into play in a validated environment that involves 21 CFR Part 11 electronic signatures, integrated robots and vision systems. The application is a real-world example of good automation standards providing real-world benefits.
At a biomedical facility in Ireland, machine automation is coming into play in a validated environment that involves 21 CFR Part 11 electronic signatures, integrated robots and vision systems. The application is a real-world example of good automation standards providing real-world benefits. That’s according to Dr. Ken Ryan, director of the Center for Automation in Motion Control at Alexandria Technical College in Alexandria, MN. Ryan was recently interviewed by Ontheedgeblog.com blogger Keith Campbell. Also interviewed by Campbell was Shane Loughlin, president of SL Controls. Ryan and Loughlin were in Ireland at the time of the interview, investigating the healthcare packaging-related application that leverages automation standards to integrate best-of-breed equipment. The information in this article is excerpted from this recent interview. Listen to the complete podcast.
Michael Becker, director of engineering, Pfizer GmbH, reported on a four-year project, “FAST,” (Fully Automated Supply and Transport), recently completed at the firm’s Freiburg, Germany plant. The plant produces tablets and capsules of Lipitor, Valoron and Neurotin for 80 different countries in a wide variety of package configurations. The highly automated, computer integrated plan helped the plant achieve OEE comparable with other industries, depending on the equipment measured.
AstraZeneca recently piloted a new data collection system from Zarpac on a packaging line at its Westborough, MA, facility to collect data to identify ways to improve uptime. The results of the study were reported in a presentation March 29 at the Pharmaceutical Packaging Forum by Jeff Rosen, senior industrial engineer, Aseptic Manufacturing and Packaging for Wilmington, DE-based AstraZeneca.
San Juan’s Convention Center hosted the Feb. 1-2, 2007 Interphex Puerto Rico conference, with a keynote presentation delivered by Maridalia Torres, director of the San Juan district Food and Drug Administration office. One of the event’s highlights was a session focusing on Packaging End-of-Line Solutions, or PELS. It involves OEMs and controls suppliers working together to assist manufacturers of life science products.
Christian von Olshausen, process engineer packing at Procter & Gamble Pharmaceuticals Germany, will be a featured speaker at the Packaging Automation Forum May 23 in Chicago.
India's pharmaceutical sector has been witnessing record growth in recent years. A $10 billion industry in 2006, Indian pharmaceuticals will grow to $25 billion by 2010.
Christian von Olshausen, process engineer packing at Procter & Gamble Pharmaceuticals Germany, will be a featured speaker at the Packaging Automation Forum May 23 in Chicago. His presentation will focus on how controls and automation technologies, properly implemented on today's packaging lines, can minimize unplanned downtime by contributing to Total Quality Management (TQM) and Total Productivity Management (TPM).
Pharmaceutical companies at Interphex Puerto Rico will explore the latest options in Packaging End-of-Line Solutions (PELS) during a special luncheon at the Feb. 1-2 event in San Juan. Register by January 31 to receive free exhibit hall admission. Exhibit hall hours are 1 p.m. to 8 p.m., while conference hours are 9 a.m. to 12:20 p.m.
Medicap’s machine counts tablets, fills them into bottles, prints and applies labels to the bottles, and then caps bottles with user-friendly closures.
A new induction cap sealer, tablet counter-filler, and labeler help this nonprofit organization more efficiently pack medicines for missions in more than 140 countries.
Packager: Tulsa, OK-based Blessings is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that provides pharmaceuticals, vitamins, and medical supplies to teams or missions that supply the drugs to clinics and hospitals in developing nations that serve indigent populations. Blessings is also involved in its own benevolent projects that provide pharmaceuticals to locations of special need and/or for disaster relief. Dr. Harold Harder, Blessings’ president, explains that about 95% of its products are solid-dose tablets or capsules, used primarily to treat various infections.
Challenges: Blessings sources drugs globally, including the purchase of pharmaceuticals in the U.S. Most of the drugs purchased internationally are bought in bulk for economic reasons. Harder estimates that Blessings repackages nearly one-third of its drugs and vitamins, primarily into bottles. The organization outsources some of its packaging, but Harder says, “We’ve really gotten more seriously into repackaging in the past year.”
Insights from a February 16 conference at Medical Device Puerto Rico.
At this presentation, Jose Sadurni, general manager of Baxter Healthcare Corp., and Felix Rivera, president of supplier Engiworks Corp., focused on the benefits of factory automation. Among their observations were the following:
Paul Greene of corporate IT at Pfizer had interoperability and widespread enterprise integration on the brain February 3 when he addressed the ARC Advisory Group’s Performance Driven Manufacturing Forum in Orlando, FL. He argued that processing, packaging, and control standards should be embraced industry-wide by packaging machinery OEMs as a means of helping pharmaceutical companies achieve greater interoperability and tighter integration of systems and data. Among his observations were the following:
