Case Studies in Capsule Filling

Aipak, as one of the leading suppliers of empty capsules for the pharmaceutical industry has an in-depth knowledge of their customer base with a wide variety of capsule filling equipment and an extensive range of filling ingredients. Understanding the influence that each one has can help prevent problems during development and lead to improved efficiency and greater productivity.

Aipak technical service team continually requests for feedback from customers on equipment purchase for fill products, process flow evaluation and personnel training to complete the productivity loop. With this insight, the company is able to determine cost savings with recommended improvements using "Savings Reports" that are based on total cost-in-use.

Now let’s talk about some cases it has summarized as below:

1.A New Look on Capsule Filling – Speed vs. Yields

The old phrase "Time is money" continues to apply in today’s demanding businesses. To deliver a finished product a company has to pay for labour and utilities, the cost of which can fluctuate depending on the volume produced – along with other fixed costs such as rent and insurance. When more products are produced, manufacturing cost is less using the same equipment and people as before. Note that time to manufacture can be broken into two controllable variables – uptime and equipment throughput.

In the business of capsule filling, it is the filling of capsules that accounts for most of the cost of the encapsulated product rather than the cost of the empty capsules. For this reason, despite the correlation between machine speed and cost, increasing production yield has been the main objective of capsule-filling operations. Savings generated from improved yield are the result of reduced losses of staring materials as well as the time and energy conserved in producing fewer filled capsules that cannot be sold. Consequently, even a small improvement in yield production can have a financially significant impact.

Case Study

Company A was experiencing poorly joined capsules on their intermittent motion capsule-filling machine for one of its products. Internal inspections of the problem caused loss of production time and consistently low yield. Upon review by the Aipak Technical Service Engineer, the setup of the closing station was targeted for improvement. The height of the counter bearing and timing of the movement was adjusted to correct the conditions causing poor joining of capsules. The adjustment resolved the issue. As a result, production downtime due to internal inspection was eliminated, yield was improved by more than 8%, and the company saved $94,000 annually for production of this one product.

2.Increasing Speed to Increase Profit

In a study conducted by Aipak, a not-so-obvious conclusion was discovered: the total cost/savings return associated with increased machine speed is higher than that for yield increase. Thirty customers involved in capsule-filling were tracked and, with the assistance of Aipak Engineers, charted the cost savings of capsule filling productivity or efficiency based on costs associated with machine speed, yield, and downtime. The average productivity savings of $91,560 per company announced to a total combined aggregate savings of about $2.747 million.

The combined savings exceeded the total annual cost of empty capsules.

The savings support the conclusion that improving the capsule filling efficiency is well worth the effort. In particular, increases in machine speed accounted for 61% of total financial impact. At the individual customer level, machine speed increases averaged approximately 14,000 capsules per hour.

The absence of faster throughput is often the by-product of other manufacturing circumstances as illustrated in the case study below.

Case Study

Company B invited Aipak to assess its capsule-filling operation. The technical service engineer noted that the company was running below the rated speed of their capsule-filling machine. The limiting factor was the non-separation of capsules at higher speeds. Upon investigation, the engineer discovered that the vacuum pump was inadequately sized for separation of the capsules at the higher speed. Once corrected, the speed was increased by 83% resulting in a financial impact of $365,000 annually.

Such cases raise the question of why there is such a large difference in realized savings when speed improves, when compared to yield improvements. The fact is that attention is at last being given to capsule filling machine speed, and companies are now understand better how to improve machine speed. Yield losses and their financial impact have routinely been a focus of manufacturing teams. As the subject of daily production meetings, yield losses are front and center with management. Machine speed compromises have tended to be more accepted remedy for yield loss, obscuring the real financial impact of running a machine below its capacity. Today, more companies are discovering how higher throughput can have a greater impact on a company’s financials than demonstrated thus far. While greater throughput enables better use of variable labour and utility costs, it also gives a company greater manufacturing capacity within the same machinery footprint. Maximizing available capacity enables growth without additional capital expenditure on equipment.

Sales@icapsulepack.com https://www.icapsulepack.com