In the tablet coating industry, success is measured by quality, uniformity, and production throughput. Your throughput rates may be efficient, but settling for anything less than excellent in the pharmaceutical industry puts you at the bottom of the market.
Key Points
- Creating a workflow map gives you a better understanding of coating machine throughput inefficiencies.
- Solving bottlenecks can be as simple as streamlining communication between the coating machine operator and your equipment.
- Ensuring your tablet coating machines are maintained minimizes downtime, resulting in improved production throughput.
- Using exchangeable coating drums lowers costs and increases throughput.
- Increasing machine throughput is seamless with modern continuous tablet coating systems.
- Properly training your coating operators has a positive impact on throughput.
- Dedicating specific staff to certain tasks increases productivity.
- Investing in a coating machine automation system has a positive impact on throughput.
Improve Your Tablet Coating Machine Throughput
There are several strategies you can implement in your tablet coating manufacturing process to improve machine throughput and increase metrics without compromising quality:
Inspect Your Workflow
Start inspecting your workflow by collecting data to get a better understanding of your coating machine throughput. Once the data is collected, create a map of your workflow that includes labor, equipment, and processes to demonstrate how they work hand-in-hand to produce quality, uniform tablets. Your workflow map should also include which data carries the most value in your overall production throughput, allowing you to locate bottlenecks and fix them easily.
Locate Bottlenecks
After a well-defined workflow map is established, locating bottlenecks is seamless. A bottleneck can be something as simple as improving communication between your tablet coating machine and its operator. If an operator is unaware of where and why a bottleneck exists, it’s crucial to collect machine throughput data to identify its root cause. Some bottlenecks are caused by a lack of knowledge of a machine’s cycle time. You can streamline cycle time bottlenecks by adjusting your machine’s depth of cut, speed, and feed rates.
Minimize Equipment Downtime
Keeping your tablet coating equipment maintained minimizes downtime and results in improved production throughput. If you experience downtime frequently due to a lack of machine maintenance, you can find ways to document and track preventive maintenance processes using a digital transformation plan. Adopting new technology that monitors machine maintenance allows you to calculate costs associated with downtime and determine how it affects your ROI.
Implement Exchangeable Drums
If you’re using a production-level tablet coater at your facility, you can purchase exchangeable drums to save time, lower costs, and increase production throughput. Multiple coating drums increase throughput by using fewer coaters. Exchangeable drums also allow you to swap out coating drums to streamline the following batch process.
Consider a Continuous Coating System
Tablets for pharmaceutical applications began processing in batch equipment nearly a hundred years ago. The batch production process still makes sense today for some applications. However, tablet coating processing equipment and techniques have seen multiple advancements throughout the years, including continuous coating systems.
Continuous tablet coating (CTC) machines provide a higher machine throughput than batch coaters by minimizing material handling and changeover between batches. CTC machines also use a smaller-diameter drum, which results in improved uniform tablet coating and decreased tablet damage.
Improve Training Programs
You can improve production efficiency and safety and reduce downtime by offering hands-on machine operation and maintenance training for your staff. Minor maintenance work, such as calibrations and inspections, have a significant impact on your machine’s throughput. Long-term productivity leads to higher revenue for your business and saves your organization time and money.
Manage Labor Efficiency
While tablet machine operators should be trained in your process to understand production throughput, limiting their responsibilities increases efficiency. Dedicated workers with limited production responsibilities perform procedures faster, reducing changeover times. By ensuring tablet coating professionals are dedicated to specific tasks, you can increase machine throughput and improve efficiency.
Leverage Coating Machine Automation
Most modern tablet coating machines are equipped with a wide variety of crucial components like automated control systems that are designed to increase production throughput.
Automated controls make it simple to optimize the machine’s operations for maximum efficiency and safety. They monitor and control:
- Running/operating state
- Various parameters, such as temperature, speed, and negative pressure
- Process data display
- Spraying guns and optimization
- Recording and printing work state
Thomas Processing Increases Tablet Production Throughput Without Compromising Quality
As one of the original innovators in pharmaceutical machinery, Thomas Processing knows how to design and manufacture innovative tablet coating machines that increase throughput without compromising the quality of your product. Today, we continue to raise the bar in tablet coating machine throughput with the Accela-CTC 500, a continuous coating machine that extends the capabilities of the current industry standard, the Flex-CTC. Contact us today to learn more about our newest coating technology.
