Enclosures for sequential, two-stage fillers help reduce changeover time because there is less cleanup required. The enclosures also improve yields by reducing product loss, according to Schwarz project engineer Jimmy Cognata.
Yet speed increases weren't the only improvement; Schwarz also called on the line to handle a new 2-L size as well as 16- and 24-oz symmetric bottles.
Twice the speed, double the package formats, and quadruple the bottle sizes: It all adds up to a
productive operation for Schwarz Pharma.
"We replaced the whole line from the infeed to the exit," Cognata explains. "We replaced the bottle descrambler, the bottle cleaner, the filling systems, the capper, the induction sealer, the labeler, and the case packer."
Much of the line's integration was done by NJM/CLI , which has helped Schwarz with three other packaging production installs.
The new line was installed in February 2007 over a six-week period in which the new equipment was placed into the previous line's footprint, though Schwarz also moved walls and added openings to others. That was followed by a three-week startup curve to debug, validate, and establish settings, according to Cognata. The line operates two shifts a day, five days a week, leaving some room for additional capacity if needed.
The generic oral solutions are distributed to hospitals and pharmacies under the brand name PEG, a line of powdered products used in conjunction with upper gastrointestinal tests to flush the system, and to add electrolytes for replenishment. Product containers, marked with a fill line for adding water by medical personnel, are shipped as bottled powders.
Setting the pace
The bottles are mechanically oriented for filling downstream. The bottles' orientation is controlled through filling, capping, and labeling. A Pace Packaging bulk hopper and Omni-line M500 unscrambler handle the initial orientation.
"We have four other Pace unscramblers," says Cognata, "but because of the four-liter bottle, we use an infeed hopper that's about 10 times the size of the others." He says operators can dump as many as 125 bottles into the 165-cu-ft hopper.
This operation was where Schwarz was able to pick up the production pace and maintain it throughout the line. "Before we could only unload bottles six at a time," he says. "Now we can dump a case of 24 at a time."
Next, the bottles are conveyed to a 14-station Orbit rotary air cleaner from McBrady Engineering. "It picks up the bottles, inverts them, blows air in, and then pulls a vacuum to draw the air out before returning the bottles to the line," Cognata explains.
The bottles are conveyed through a portal in the wall into a filling room that houses two All-Fill systems along with associated packaging systems. For its 2- and 4-L containers, Schwarz does the filling in two stages. For the symmetric, smaller bottles, the filling is done in one stage, and the bottles are conveyed directly to the second (rotary) filler. The current workhorse container is the 4-L bottle.
The first-stage filler is done on an All-Fill Multi-Fill Series 70 linear machine with four auger filling stations and an optional enclosure. Just ahead of the system, a pick-and-place unit lifts four bottles at a time from the continuous-motion, flood-fill upstream conveyor and spaces them properly for four-up indexed filling. The line changes from continuous flow to indexing at the first filler and then returns to a continuous operation into the second filler and through the remainder of the line. The filler offers a feedback control for precise filling.
"There's a feedback loop that will either slow down or speed up the auger," Cognata explains. That's done on a tare of the empty bottles ahead of the filler and with weigh scales after filling. "As the powder builds up on the auger over time on a shift, it has to go faster to provide the same amount and rate." He reports that it provides a "very tight" 0.2% fill accuracy of the product.
The bottles exit the fill stations and are pushed onto a parallel conveyor moving in the opposite direction. This takes them around the curve of a U-shaped conveyor section where they are turned 90 deg ahead of the All-Fill 12-station, continuous-motion rotary filler. The enclosure is standard on All-Fill's rotary machinery.
After exiting the filler, the bottles convey past an All-Fill Alpha checkweigher that communicates with the filler to correct the fill amounts. Schwarz permits a final netweight fill tolerance within 5%, Cognata says, though All-Fill states the machine is capable of 1%.
A pneumatic reject station after a metal detector handles bad weights or contaminated products.
Containers proceed through a Kaps-All capper, a unit Cognata describes as unique because of how it accepts the bottle's offset neck.
"Most in-line cappers have no problems with a standard bottle, but when you have an offset neck, there's a challenge because you don't want to cap it and indent the top of the bottle," he says. Because of the offset nature of the containers, there's more give in the bottle shoulders away from the sidewalls. For the Kaps-All six-head/three-station capper, that's no problem.
Next, bottles convey through an inspection system from NJM/CLI. It verifies that the cap has been applied properly, i.e., that it's tight and not skewed. "If it's on loose, it will be rejected due to height," Cognata points out.
Bottles continue to an Enercon Industries Corp. induction sealer that is used for about 20% of the line's output, Cognata says. Adjustable for different container heights, the air-cooled unit features an All-in-One pivoting head for easy adjustment of dwell time for the range of closure sizes Schwarz can run.
Bottles exit the filling room to a room that houses the NJM/CLI Auto-Colt Model 326 print-and-apply labeler and the unscrambler. The labeler affixes labels printed with product name, product code, lot, expiration date, and National Drug Code to one of the bottle's panels. The machine features a servo-driven label dispenser and offers a programmable logic controller with color touchscreen operator interface to control machine functions.
Before labels are applied, each one is inspected by an Optel Vision system. It reads and verifies the preprinted Code 128 bar code, as well as the printed expiration date and lot number. The system includes two post-labeling optical inspection devices. "The system also informs us whether the label's on, if it's skewed, or if it's straight," says Cognata. "
Bottles exit from that room into the warehouse to the robotic IMA top-loading case packer that loads the bottles either six or 12 per case. Boxed product is then unitized for distribution. A second IMA case packer located adjacent to the first was installed to handle the 2-L bottle that Schwarz plans to introduce.
Besides doubling speeds and improving changeover time, the line is integrated for smoother, more efficient operations, Cognata notes. "When a machine is down, it automatically stops the upstream machine so the bottles don't back up," he says. "And when a machine starts running again, the upstream machines restart automatically."
There have also been labor savings versus the prior line: The line was manned by nine operators, but now only seven are needed.
Overall, the line startup represents about a $3 million investment, Cognata says. Depending on the timing for new products, payback could be as short as less than two years, he says.
Thanks to due diligence by Schwarz and its vendors, the line has met the company's expectations. "We really did our homework so everything is running as designed," Cognata says, "and we're getting the actual output speed that we requested. Sometimes you ask for a speed, and vendors give it to you, but only if you're running at 100-percent capacity. Yet we're hitting the actual speed that we requested while running this line at around 80 percent of capability."
Read more case studies at www.healthcarepackaging.com/go/17
--By Rick Lingle, Technical Editor, Packaging World
Yet speed increases weren't the only improvement; Schwarz also called on the line to handle a new 2-L size as well as 16- and 24-oz symmetric bottles.
Twice the speed, double the package formats, and quadruple the bottle sizes: It all adds up to a
productive operation for Schwarz Pharma.
"We replaced the whole line from the infeed to the exit," Cognata explains. "We replaced the bottle descrambler, the bottle cleaner, the filling systems, the capper, the induction sealer, the labeler, and the case packer."
Much of the line's integration was done by NJM/CLI , which has helped Schwarz with three other packaging production installs.
The new line was installed in February 2007 over a six-week period in which the new equipment was placed into the previous line's footprint, though Schwarz also moved walls and added openings to others. That was followed by a three-week startup curve to debug, validate, and establish settings, according to Cognata. The line operates two shifts a day, five days a week, leaving some room for additional capacity if needed.
The generic oral solutions are distributed to hospitals and pharmacies under the brand name PEG, a line of powdered products used in conjunction with upper gastrointestinal tests to flush the system, and to add electrolytes for replenishment. Product containers, marked with a fill line for adding water by medical personnel, are shipped as bottled powders.
Setting the pace
The bottles are mechanically oriented for filling downstream. The bottles' orientation is controlled through filling, capping, and labeling. A Pace Packaging bulk hopper and Omni-line M500 unscrambler handle the initial orientation.
"We have four other Pace unscramblers," says Cognata, "but because of the four-liter bottle, we use an infeed hopper that's about 10 times the size of the others." He says operators can dump as many as 125 bottles into the 165-cu-ft hopper.
This operation was where Schwarz was able to pick up the production pace and maintain it throughout the line. "Before we could only unload bottles six at a time," he says. "Now we can dump a case of 24 at a time."
Next, the bottles are conveyed to a 14-station Orbit rotary air cleaner from McBrady Engineering. "It picks up the bottles, inverts them, blows air in, and then pulls a vacuum to draw the air out before returning the bottles to the line," Cognata explains.
The bottles are conveyed through a portal in the wall into a filling room that houses two All-Fill systems along with associated packaging systems. For its 2- and 4-L containers, Schwarz does the filling in two stages. For the symmetric, smaller bottles, the filling is done in one stage, and the bottles are conveyed directly to the second (rotary) filler. The current workhorse container is the 4-L bottle.
The first-stage filler is done on an All-Fill Multi-Fill Series 70 linear machine with four auger filling stations and an optional enclosure. Just ahead of the system, a pick-and-place unit lifts four bottles at a time from the continuous-motion, flood-fill upstream conveyor and spaces them properly for four-up indexed filling. The line changes from continuous flow to indexing at the first filler and then returns to a continuous operation into the second filler and through the remainder of the line. The filler offers a feedback control for precise filling.
"There's a feedback loop that will either slow down or speed up the auger," Cognata explains. That's done on a tare of the empty bottles ahead of the filler and with weigh scales after filling. "As the powder builds up on the auger over time on a shift, it has to go faster to provide the same amount and rate." He reports that it provides a "very tight" 0.2% fill accuracy of the product.
The bottles exit the fill stations and are pushed onto a parallel conveyor moving in the opposite direction. This takes them around the curve of a U-shaped conveyor section where they are turned 90 deg ahead of the All-Fill 12-station, continuous-motion rotary filler. The enclosure is standard on All-Fill's rotary machinery.
After exiting the filler, the bottles convey past an All-Fill Alpha checkweigher that communicates with the filler to correct the fill amounts. Schwarz permits a final netweight fill tolerance within 5%, Cognata says, though All-Fill states the machine is capable of 1%.
A pneumatic reject station after a metal detector handles bad weights or contaminated products.
Containers proceed through a Kaps-All capper, a unit Cognata describes as unique because of how it accepts the bottle's offset neck.
"Most in-line cappers have no problems with a standard bottle, but when you have an offset neck, there's a challenge because you don't want to cap it and indent the top of the bottle," he says. Because of the offset nature of the containers, there's more give in the bottle shoulders away from the sidewalls. For the Kaps-All six-head/three-station capper, that's no problem.
Next, bottles convey through an inspection system from NJM/CLI. It verifies that the cap has been applied properly, i.e., that it's tight and not skewed. "If it's on loose, it will be rejected due to height," Cognata points out.
Bottles continue to an Enercon Industries Corp. induction sealer that is used for about 20% of the line's output, Cognata says. Adjustable for different container heights, the air-cooled unit features an All-in-One pivoting head for easy adjustment of dwell time for the range of closure sizes Schwarz can run.
Bottles exit the filling room to a room that houses the NJM/CLI Auto-Colt Model 326 print-and-apply labeler and the unscrambler. The labeler affixes labels printed with product name, product code, lot, expiration date, and National Drug Code to one of the bottle's panels. The machine features a servo-driven label dispenser and offers a programmable logic controller with color touchscreen operator interface to control machine functions.
Before labels are applied, each one is inspected by an Optel Vision system. It reads and verifies the preprinted Code 128 bar code, as well as the printed expiration date and lot number. The system includes two post-labeling optical inspection devices. "The system also informs us whether the label's on, if it's skewed, or if it's straight," says Cognata. "
Bottles exit from that room into the warehouse to the robotic IMA top-loading case packer that loads the bottles either six or 12 per case. Boxed product is then unitized for distribution. A second IMA case packer located adjacent to the first was installed to handle the 2-L bottle that Schwarz plans to introduce.
Besides doubling speeds and improving changeover time, the line is integrated for smoother, more efficient operations, Cognata notes. "When a machine is down, it automatically stops the upstream machine so the bottles don't back up," he says. "And when a machine starts running again, the upstream machines restart automatically."
There have also been labor savings versus the prior line: The line was manned by nine operators, but now only seven are needed.
Overall, the line startup represents about a $3 million investment, Cognata says. Depending on the timing for new products, payback could be as short as less than two years, he says.
Thanks to due diligence by Schwarz and its vendors, the line has met the company's expectations. "We really did our homework so everything is running as designed," Cognata says, "and we're getting the actual output speed that we requested. Sometimes you ask for a speed, and vendors give it to you, but only if you're running at 100-percent capacity. Yet we're hitting the actual speed that we requested while running this line at around 80 percent of capability."
Read more case studies at www.healthcarepackaging.com/go/17
--By Rick Lingle, Technical Editor, Packaging World
