Liquid pharmaceutical manufacturers operate under great scrutiny and must set high standards of product quality. In three steps, Jürgen Kress, General Manager for Checkweighing and Vision Inspection, Mettler-Toledo Product Inspection, outlines how sophisticated weighing technology helps ensure that liquid pharma products are safe for consumers and compliant with regulations. He also examines the importance of serialisation and aggregation and how product inspection helps drive transparency in the digital supply chain. Finally, he explains the importance of software connectivity as a critical part of making product packaging quality happen.
Extract:
‘Ensuring Complete Product Packaging Quality‘
Step 1: Safety First – Getting Dosage Sizes and Pack Completeness Right
It’s no exaggeration to say that quality assurance in liquid pharmaceuticals is a matter of life and death: give a patient too much or too little of a dosage, and the results might prove fatal.
Such potential consequences are bound to keep liquid pharmaceutical manufacturers on their toes. Their responsibility is to drive high standards in product quality, and to maintain these standards through the filling and packaging processes that ultimately deliver the finished product – be it a bottle, vial, ampule, or other vessel – to the patient or health sector organisation that will use it.
The Technology Solution
The solution for liquid pharma manufacturers lies is technical automation. Product inspection systems can perform the required technical tasks, in a fail-safe manner, and at the production speeds that manufacturers need to operate at to be profitable.
In this specific field, an advanced checkweigher is the best option to check that dosage sizes are correct within primary packaging. The system must be capable of extremely accurate weighing and of careful product handling. These products are very often small, light, fragile, and, in the case of bottles, if not securely supported on the conveyor belt, are liable to tip over during processing. If a container breaks, there is spillage and possible glass fragments that can cause a line to shut down for clean-up, along with waste from the affected products on the line.
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