Pharmaceutical and Medical Packaging News
Magazine
PMPN Article Index
Originally Published October 1999
CASE HISTORY
Labeler Meets Inhaler Demand
A number of suppliers worked together to speed label production.
When the sales volumes of Glaxo Wellcome's (Ware, Hertfordshire, UK) multidose powder inhaler, the Diskus, doubled in one year, project manager Malcom Pinfold knew it was time to update its labeling system. A few years ago, Pinfold's team had already selected custom-built machinery to produce the inhaler and had employed a labeling system from Harland Machine Systems Ltd. (Salford, Manchester, UK, and Delran, NJ). As sales took off, Glaxo decided that it wanted to add a number of new features to its labeling system in order to meet increased demand.
First, the firm wanted to move from manual to automatic product feeding. Secondly, it needed a vision system. Glaxo also wanted to wrap product packs with film before cartoning in order to provide extra tamper evidence, and it wanted to add folded leaflet instructions to the outside of the carton. To help Glaxo satisfy these requirements, Harland decided to partner with a number of other suppliers.
Working with CAM Systems (Bury St. Edmonds, Suffolk, UK), Harland replaced Glaxo's system of manually feeding packs into pucks on the conveyor with an automated feeding system. The new system handles deep plastic trays specified by Glaxo to hold the Diskus packs in five rows of seven; it consists of a 10-tray vertical magazine that is manually fed from storage pallets. Each tray is then elevated to a pick-and-place area where five pneumatic fingers, mounted on a head moving along the x- and y-axes, grip the packs at the pitch they occupy in the tray. As they are transferred to the label conveyor, the fingers automatically change position to match the wider pitch of the awaiting pucks. Labeling speeds have now reached 70 packs per minute.
The next challenge was to develop a vision system. Harland brought onboard Systech (Cranbury, NJ), which supplied its TIPS system. It consists of two cameras, one on each side of the labeler, which view the applied labels and verify the fixed and variable coded information. Labels are displayed directly on the machine's touch screen module. The system judges the position of the labels applied to the pack and rejects those with out-of-limit labels or those with incorrect, missing, or unsatisfactory codes. Built into its program is a character recognition system that identifies and verifies characters even if some definition is removed. Products with problematic labels are removed without disrupting operations by a rotating arm fitted with two grippers, one of which lifts the product from the puck before rotating 180° to a drop zone, leaving the spare gripper free for the next reject.
One of Glaxo's markets requires that product packs be wrapped with film before cartoning to ensure extra tamper evidence. To meet this particular need, Harland supplied a flow wrapper from Otem, which connects to a side-load cartoning machine from Marchesini Packaging Machinery (West Caldwell, NJ).
Finally, Glaxo needed to place folded instruction leaflets on the outside of its cartons. Harland provided an overhead outserter, which uses 3M's 920 XL tape coated on one face with a special transferable adhesive. Prefolded leaflets, stacked in a magazine that holds up to 350, are plucked singly from the bottom by a carrier, shuttled to the exposed adhesive side of the tape, and lightly stamped onto the tape during a pause in the machine's intermittent motion. The leaflets, now continuously bonded to the tape, travel onwards to a dispenser situated above incoming cartons. The system can operate at speeds up to 300 leaflets per minute.
Glaxo's Diskus annual production output reached 12 million units in 1997 and 18 million in 1998 and is forecasted to reach 25 million by the end of 1999. According to Pinfold, the ongoing relationship with Harland and its partners and the subsequent advancements of the labeling system have enabled Glaxo to meet its requirements for such a high-volume production.
