CONTRACT PACKAGING
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Contract packagers invest a lot of their capital in the latest packaging equipment. Photograph of a blister packaging line courtesy of Alcan Packaging. |
Design Experience
Interested in exploring a new type of packaging? Contract packagers have a range of design expertise and services—and the experience to back them up. “In general, we’re dealing with the top 30 pharma companies in the world on a regular basis,” says Pete Belden, vice president of sales at Anderson Packaging (Rockford, IL). “With the range of products and projects that we get exposed to, we might see more than many of our customers do.” This includes plenty of experience with compliance packaging and child-resistant, senior-friendly designs, for which Belden says demand is on the rise.
Packaging Insights (Norris, TN) also considers compliance carding a strategic benefit, according to Paul Glintenkamp, director of pharmaceutical packaging at Packaging Insights. “Some companies don’t have a lot of experience with compliance carding,” he says. “We do, solely because of the nature of our business.” The company also has both structural and graphic designers in-house, and folding-carton capabilities that allow them to test customer samples within days.
In many cases, contract packagers can also offer advanced prototyping technology. “Applying the latest technology in terms of software and sample-making equipment, we can produce a rapid turnaround of designs and prototypes,” says John Groetsch, senior designer at Sharp (Conshohocken, PA). “Adding to this our ability to aid the customers in supplying graphic color prototypes makes the collaborative process advantageous for both Sharp and our customer. Since we get to see the whole spectrum of potential designs across the industry, our designers can often provide concepts and renderings that provide our customers with the latest and greatest options available across the industry.”
Patented technologies
Packagers often even have patented products of their own or can design them for customers. Cardinal Health (Somerset, NJ) has a design services team that can produce patent-protected opening features or child-resistant and senior-friendly features, says Renard Jackson, executive vice president of sales and business development, packaging services. While a company’s in-house package designers might lack the experience or equipment (such as CAD-CAM systems) needed for this level of R&D, with contract packagers like Cardinal, “you have access to an organization that can provide you with a unique, one-only package,” Jackson says.
Contract packagers can also offer companies access to hot new tech-nologies just being embraced by the industry. One of those areas, says Tim Notter, vice president of sales and marketing at CWS Contract Packaging (Norwich, NY), is edible films. CWS has partnered with film manufacturers to offer a turnkey solution for pharmaceutical companies interested in the technology. “The growing part of that business will be in a unit-dose type format,” Notter says. “We’re just on the fringe of this stuff hitting the Rx market.”
Howell Packaging (Elmira, NY) holds a number of patents for child-resistant packaging. “A package that is currently gaining a lot of attention is our “howell•CR•III” package,” says Joe Lally, marketing manager, packaging for pharmaceuticals. “This design joins a non-child-resistant solid-dose blister to a wallet-style paperboard configuration, and it has achieved an F=1 rating. It is cost-effective, senior-friendly, and capable of high-speed production.”
Customers of Vetter Pharma-Fertigung GmbH & Co. KG have the option of using the company’s patented Vetter Lyo-Ject dual-chamber syringe technology, which allows the active ingredient in a drug to be lyophilized in one chamber and to be mixed with a solvent in a second chamber immediately before application.
Expertise
Find yourself in new territory through an acquisition or merger? Contract organizations can help, says Jeff Turns, president of Vetter Pharma-Turm Inc., the U.S. affiliate of Vetter. “That’s our company’s area of expertise: offering full service to its customers, from feasibility tests to commercial production,” he says. “So it’s not only easier for large pharmaceutical companies to contract the work to us, but also profitable, since Vetter can speed up the crucial time to market.”
This can be especially true in areas such as biologic drugs, which have unique requirements that include aseptic formulation and filling, product recirculation, cold manufacturing, and time-pressure filling for shear-sensitive products. Baxter BioPharma Solutions (Bloomington, IL) employs state-of-the-art equipment to meet the growing demands of biologics, along with a team of in-house scientists with more than 100 years combined experience, says Joe Mase, global group market manager, contract services.
Baxter’s equipment has been designed with standardized, quick-changeover drug-contact parts, allowing for shorter lead times. And its facility includes one of the few existing totally automated package-kitting lines, capable of producing 80 kits per minute with components that include swabs, vials, syringes, drug-transfer devices, and inserts. The line includes automated inspection, sealing, and packing, and it can be configured multiple ways, with five or six different stations. The firm also has in-line and in-house thermoformers so that it can design custom blisters for kits.
Capacity
What if you’re working with the same product lines, but trying to meet a surge in demand? “Our business model has always been to have ample excess capacity in a variety of packaging formats,” says Belden. Anderson has been growing an average of 15 to 20% per year, and Belden says that in six years, the company has quadrupled capacity.
Baxter BioPharma has also dramatically expanded capacity. “We’ve invested more than $100 million in our contract manufacturing and packaging facility during the past four years,” says Mase. According to him, Baxter can fill a million syringes per day and will add more vial-filling capacity beginning in 2007.
Careful equipment planning can also help contract packagers be ready to meet capacity needs. “Typically, contract packagers will have multiple identical production lines,” says Thau. This means that if a customer suddenly needs to double or triple capacity—for instance, if it is a particularly difficult flu season and they’re pack-aging an antiviral—this can be done quickly over the short term.
But it isn’t just big jobs that are tough to fit in. Sometimes, companies need help with short runs for projects such as stability testing. “We’re setting up areas of our facilities to take those jobs and do them,” says Kevin J. Carter, sales executive for McKesson RxPak (Memphis). By streamlining and generating programs that work, “we make it efficient for us, so we make it as economically viable for them as possible.” Cardinal also has the ability to handle stability-testing-sized runs, says Jackson.
Equipment
Looking to improve efficiencies through new equipment technology? Contract packagers also tend to have the capital and cause to invest in the latest equipment. And while basic packaging equipment doesn’t change all that frequently, some capabilities do. Scanners and vision systems, for instance, need to be changed every two to three years to be current and state-of-the-art, according to a spokesperson for Alcan Packaging (Bethlehem, PA). QA systems, printing, and control systems also need to be kept up to date, says Carter. Newer equipment can also offer faster changeover times, and it is sometimes built for compliance with 21 CFR Part 11, Carter adds.
Anderson Packaging has invested heavily in vision systems, automation, and coding technology for producing lot numbers and expiration dates,
says Belden. “We have partnered with what we consider to be the preferred equipment vendors for each of our packaging technologies,” he says.
But contract packagers don’t just have the machines, they have the staff trained to operate them. “Today’s equipment is not plug-and-play,” Thau of Sonic Packaging says. “You really need to determine where to spend your resources.”
“In most cases, a brand new line can be configured and validated in a shorter time frame at a contract packager than at a major pharma company,” Howell’s Lally claims. “Our packaging lines can be configured in seemingly endless combinations,” he says. “All line components are mobile and interchangeable.”
Added Agility
Maybe your objective is to turn a project around more quickly—especially if it’s a new product headed for market. Cardinal Health has fully integrated capability, including folding carton, label, and insert production, says Jackson. This means that in a launch situation where the insert is generally the last component to receive FDA approval, the contractor can “turn on production of that insert as soon as we receive artwork” and begin packaging product within 24 to 48 hours.
If problems arise, contract packagers’ relationships with vendors and suppliers mean that they are poised to solve them more quickly than their customers could manage alone. “We’ve got a direct line to our equipment supplier, who also supplies our tooling,” explains McKesson’s Carter. He recalls one instance in which the company was running a test for a customer and had some challenges with the material. They got Uhlmann, the equipment supplier and a close partner, on the phone and addressed the issues point by point.
Contract packagers are often also in a position to make decisions—and act on them—more quickly than in-house packaging operations. And this can help during many types of projects. “We can make a very quick decision on whether we want to run Saturdays or Sundays, evenings or holidays,” says Mahesh Gupta, president of Nutra-Med Packaging Inc. (Rockaway, NJ). This is not the case, he says, at a large manufacturing company. “Think about how many layers they have to go through to make this decision,” he says. Even pricing decisions can be easier to reach through a contract packager, says Gupta. “We don’t have to show Wall Street how much money we are making. So we can often provide a better price than people could manage in-house,” he says.
And contract packagers’ customers expect nothing less. “We have to realize we are a service-only business,” says Bill Walker, vice president of sales and marketing at Sharp Corp. “Our performance is dependent on the receipt of our customers’ requirements, bulk, components, and approval, and therefore, we need to have quick reaction time to offset unplanned and unforeseen delays to our customers’ schedules.”
A lot of in-house packagers have restrictions from internal policies that may not add value to the process, according to Alcan’s spokesperson. Contract packagers do not cut corners and they must be in compliance, but they may do things a little more creatively to serve the client quicker.
