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PharmaFab's line delivers 'fab' results

Integrator helps contract manufacturer PharmaFab quickly start up a new liquid pharmaceutical filling line. The results: faster speeds, less product giveaway, and quicker changeovers.

Standing in front of the eight-head piston filler, a PharmaFab employee monitors production on the company's new liquid pharmac
Standing in front of the eight-head piston filler, a PharmaFab employee monitors production on the company's new liquid pharmac

Packager: PharmaFab is a Grand Prairie, TX-based contract manufacturer. The CM manufactures prescription and over-the-counter product, filling capsules and tablets on three packaging lines, liquid pharmaceuticals on two other lines. PharmaFab produces product for pharmaceutical companies, private-label firms, and distributors.

Darlene Ryan, president and chief executive officer, says sales have grown from $36ꯠ in the company’s first year (1996) to about $30 million in fiscal 2004. Its plant has more than doubled in size, to 100ꯠ sq’. With newly leased space, the company will soon have more than 200ꯠ sq’ for its operations.

Challenges: 1. Increasing customer demands and meeting regulations from the Food and Drug Administration make packaging flexibility a priority at PharmaFab, which operates by current Good Manufacturing Practices (cGMP).

2. Need to improve line speed, reduce changeover time, and lessen product giveaway by replacing an older liquid filling line. The new line had to be operational in three months after equipment was ordered so that it could produce cough and cold remedies for the fall and winter season when the product is most in demand.

3. Suppliers needed to meet PharmaFab’s guiding principles for forming a business partnership. The principles are: tell the truth, be fair, care about people, help the customer succeed, and increase the company’s value, but never at the expense of these principles.

Changes: PharmaFab employs Modular Packaging Systems as an engineering integrator for the line, a company it had worked with in the past. From beginning to end, the new line includes:

• A Kaps-All AU-3 unscrambler that places high-density polyethylene bottles onto a conveyor. Glass bottles are loaded on a feed table that are fed into a McBrady Model #200 Orbit bottle cleaner. The bottles are rinsed with air while inverted, then reverted back to the conveyor.

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