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Pharmaceutical and Medical Packaging News Magazine
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Originally Published October 1998

OUR VIEW

Robots: The Keys to Building a Flexible Automated Packaging Line

Use of flexible robotics can help pharmaceutical packagers remain competitive into the next millennium.

With the advent of generic drugs, the pharmaceutical industry has become increasingly competitive. Brand-name pharmaceutical companies are currently under intense pressure to commercialize new drugs faster and cheaper than ever before, and expedited product introductions mean increased pressure on packagers to fill, seal, label, and carton pharmaceuticals quickly and efficiently. Other challenges include shortened product life cycles, demands for improved quality, and increasing labor costs. Many pharmaceutical companies have responded by automating their packaging operations.

Many market drivers have led companies in other industries such as automotive and electronics to handle global competition by using flexible robotics to automate production. For example, the short product life cycle of cellular phones (down to six months) and their proliferation have driven the electronics industry to use robotic automation.

In the mid-1990s, these same market drivers emerged in the pharmaceutical packaging market. Many drug makers have expanded the number of package types for their products. In 1981, there were 2619 new products introduced, while in 1994 there were 16,000. In 1995, there were more than 25,000 new products introduced to U.S. grocery and drug stores. The changes were primarily to the packaging, not to the products themselves. Such diversity requires flexible packaging lines, making dedicated automation ones impractical.

Robotic automation has become an increasingly attractive option for drug packagers for a number of reasons. Robot speeds have increased, sensory capabilities such as vision guidance have been introduced, robots with environmental tolerance such as washdown capability have become available, and economic justifications have emerged.

Robots have been used successfully to assemble pharmaceutical kits and handle difficult items like IV bags. Robotics and vision systems may also be used effectively to pack pill assortments in blisters with 100% accuracy and to change assortment content through software commands. For example, when two robots equipped with vision place pills into the blister packs, the vision system can detect subtle differences in shape between the pills and verify that the fill is accurate.

A recent article in Robotics World identified the pharmaceutical industry as the next big growth area for robotics and vision. But so far, flexible automation is not as widely used in pharmaceutical companies as in the electronics or automotive industries.

Pharmaceutical companies need to study the automation trends in other industries and to learn how robotics and vision systems can save production costs and add to the bottom line. As the market for pharmaceutical packaging automation continues to expand, robotic systems will continue to become more cost-effective, reliable, and easy to use, and they will become essential to any company expecting to maintain a competitive edge into the next millennium.

Duncheon is also with Adept Technology Inc. For more information about RIA, call 734/994-6088 or visit http://www.robotics.org.