The pharmaceutical trade is closely regulated to make sure the secure supply of medicines and healthcare merchandise. This makes it a very difficult trade after we’re speaking about delivery and logistics.
There are numerous useful functions of robotics within the pharmaceutical trade, together with the meeting of medical units, filling and sealing medicinal merchandise, and machine tending of check tools. Nonetheless, palletizing is usually the most effective first automation tasks within the pharmaceutical trade, as it’s simple to deploy and may have a fast payback time. And it could possibly immediately have an effect on your logistics.
Palletizing is a key step for guaranteeing the integrity of your merchandise throughout cargo. Should you use the improper forms of pallets, pack them incorrectly, or fail to fulfill the required rules, you can jeopardize a whole cargo.
On this article, we discover how pharmaceutical corporations can use robotic palletizing to fulfill cargo rules and assist make their end-of-line course of extra environment friendly.
Why rules are key in pharmaceutical logistics
The pharmaceutical trade is notoriously sluggish to undertake new applied sciences due to the strict rules that have an effect on virtually all facets of a enterprise.
The precise rules that govern your pharmaceutical firm’s logistics will rely upon the place you’re on the earth.
For instance, Good Manufacturing Practices (GMPs) are one set of rules that apply to European and American pharmaceutical corporations, amongst others. The GMPs dictate that you should guarantee the standard and security of your merchandise in any respect levels of manufacturing, together with throughout transportation and storage.
The explanation for this deep regulation is obvious: the standard of pharmaceutical merchandise immediately impacts folks’s well being. In different industries, say the patron items trade, the impacts of poor high quality are usually much less catastrophic than within the pharmaceutical trade.
Logistics is essential for a variety of causes, corresponding to:
Late delivered or broken orders can result in sufferers not receiving probably life-saving merchandise.
Poorly packaged or shipped merchandise can compromise the effectiveness or security of these merchandise in ways in which won’t be apparent (corresponding to delivery merchandise on the improper temperature).
Dangerous monitoring of merchandise can imply that the improper merchandise are despatched to a medical institution.
By bettering your cargo course of – corresponding to by including robotic palletizing – you may scale back these dangers, serving to you to fulfill the related rules for your small business.
The chilly chain in pharmaceutical logistics
One facet of logistics that’s massively vital for pharmaceutical corporations is the idea of the “chilly chain”. It performs a crucial position in delivering temperature-controlled merchandise safely.
Chilly chain administration entails a variety of methods, practices, and applied sciences to move and retailer perishable items, corresponding to biopharmaceuticals. It’s important for sustaining the integrity of merchandise, corresponding to vaccines and drugs.
To be able to keep compliant with regulatory requirements, you should be certain that your perishable merchandise keep in an uninterrupted temperature-controlled setting throughout the complete product journey from manufacturing to lastly being administered to a affected person.
How automated palletizing might help meet pharmaceutical packaging necessities
A problem with chilly chain packaging is that chilly warehouses are usually not comfy environments for human employees. Working lengthy hours in chilly rooms might be detrimental to folks’s well being and scale back their job satisfaction.
Hazards for folks working in chilled warehouses embrace bodily discomfort, numbness in limbs and arms, impaired bodily and psychological functioning, and life-threatening hypothermia.
By automating your palletizing course of, you may assist to cut back these dangers for employees.
Different advantages related to automated palletizing for pharmaceutical logistics embrace:
Improved consistency of pallet masses — Guide palletizing doesn’t assure the optimum weight distribution of pallet masses, which might result in instability and product injury. Automated options palletize in the identical manner each time.
Higher use of human labor — In lots of components of the world, it’s exhausting to search out people who find themselves prepared to work in any packaging and logistics jobs, not to mention these in chilly environments.
Sooner turnaround instances — The improved productiveness and consistency that may include robotic palletizing implies that you reliably ship merchandise quicker. In such a time-sensitive trade as prescribed drugs, this could grow to be a aggressive benefit to your firm.
For a listing of extra advantages of palletizing robots for pharmaceutical corporations, try our earlier publish.
Key components of a profitable robotic palletizing course of
What facets of a robotic palletizing answer are most vital when product integrity is your prime concern?
Some components to search for in an answer embrace:
It is going to be simple to combine and function with out loads of robotics experience in your crew.
It could deal with the scale and weight of product containers you employ.
It could attain the peak essential to stack a whole field.
You possibly can combine it with any monitoring applied sciences crucial for product traceability.
The supplier of the answer understands the palletizing trade and has a historical past of working with pharmaceutical corporations.
Additionally, you will in all probability produce other components which can be vital to your particular logistics course of. The easiest way to make sure that a specific answer will meet these wants is to get in touch with the supplier and ask about your necessities.
Is robotic palletizing the best answer for guaranteeing your product integrity
When your pharmaceutical merchandise are in excessive demand, it may be difficult to distribute them effectively whereas nonetheless assembly the logistics rules.
A robotic palletizing answer might be the right answer to rapidly scale back the bottleneck round palletizing. It could assist to make your palletizing employee’s jobs extra satisfying whereas concurrently bettering the consistency of the palletizing step.
There are, in fact, many facets of a pharmaceutical manufacturing course of that can have an effect on product integrity. Palletizing will solely have an effect on these associated to cargo. Nonetheless, including a robotic might be such a fast win for a lot of corporations that it is smart to discover whether or not it might work to your pharmaceutical firm.
What difficulties do you might have round pharmaceutical logistics? Inform us within the feedback beneath or be a part of the dialogue on LinkedIn, Twitteror Fb.
