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Assessing Contract Packaging Trends in the Healthcare Market

Steve Meeker, Legacy Pharmaceutical Packaging’s President, discusses the impact of serialization, as well as machinery and materials trends.

As a 40-year pharmaceutical industry veteran, with experience with several manufacturer end-user firms, how do you get the most flexibility and output from your contract packaging facility?

Steve Meeker, President, Legacy Pharmaceutical Packaging: We employ modular concepts for all of our packaging suites so our facility has a great flow of materials and components. It’s similar to a greenfield operation in that these suites are within a wide-open layout in 190,000 square feet. The suite concept allows us to separate potential contamination from incoming materials, such as corrugated. The suites are based on functions, so we have one with HEPA filtration for a fill room, with downstream functions in their own environment. Right now you could say we run 13 “lines on average per day,” and we will have two more installed by mid-to-late 2017.

Does the company try to standardize on equipment suppliers or prefer the flexibility of using multiple vendors?

We do try to standardize, and we do this with our NJM Packaging bottling lines and Cremer tablet counters. I think there is financial benefit in the standardization of spare parts and changeparts. I also think it's important to build on those relationships.

Another advantage with machine standardization is in training our employees on that equipment. We've focused on training, operator certification, and maintenance certification. To build those programs for a variety of different equipment is tougher. So, if you have familiarity with the technical and operational aspects of a machine, it just makes for a more balanced and flexible work crew, it's easier to get people trained, and it helps our employees become subject-matter experts quicker.

That said, we are a contract packager, so flexibility, agility, and increasing customer value are all imperative. How can we achieve that technically? We have several what you might call mid-speed lines, built with fast changeovers in mind. All the lines are built for absolute reduction of any cross-contamination potential. Some of our lines are for larger batch sizes, or jobs may run on a line that is geared to run 180 bottles a minute, so if we have a medium-sized batch it might run on a line that runs 60 to 90 bottles a minute. That is one of our disciplines for tailoring to particular products. Another consideration is minimizing changeovers, based on knowing if we’re running smaller or larger bottles.

How does Legacy Pharmaceutical Packaging differentiate itself from other contract packagers dealing with the same packaging and industry issues?

We are absolutely customer-centric, and our focus is on service level. I would say probably 80 percent of our products can run on multiple lines; so that if we get an order from customer "A," a product might run on one particular line, but we also have a backup, and sometimes a backup to the backup. We maintain a targeted dock-to-dock turnaround time of three weeks.

We want to differentiate ourselves and we know there a lot of good contract packagers and manufacturers out there. I think the key word is agility. We can provide service at whatever level you need, be it a complete turnkey operation or if you just need us to take your materials and convert them into a finished product.

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