Selecting the Best Pharmaceutical Equipment for Your Manufacturing Needs
When shopping for new pharmaceutical equipment, manufacturers need to identify the best products that can meet their facility’s current needs as well as anticipated future growth. When your scope of work increases, having a sound mechanical infrastructure in place can ensure that you are ready to meet demand.
Today, we are going to cover what you need to know about purchasing the right equipment for your pharmaceutical manufacturing facility. First, we are going to start with selecting machinery by size.
Selecting the Right Size Pharmaceutical Equipment
If Your Equipment is Too Small
If your packaging and production equipment are not large enough to handle your manufacturing demands, this will halt productivity in little time. Rather than efficiently moving units of product to their packaging phase, batches will take more time to produce. This will leave clients frustrated when they need a quicker turnaround.
Overstressing smaller equipment will also cause it to break down more frequently. This results in increased repair costs and may require a replacement in the near future.
If Your Machines are Too Large
Machines that are too large for your facility will compete against other necessary equipment for floor space. They also will likely cost more to purchase and install while not performing to their full potential. This can quickly generate a poor return on investment by over-anticipating future scope.
Conversely, you might need large equipment that cannot fit in with the rest of the other machinery at your facility. In these cases, it is best to contact the equipment manufacturer or retailer to ask if they have other configuration options for the large equipment. As an example, large gummy manufacturing equipment can also come in a stacked kitchen layout to limit the amount of required floor space.
What is the “Just Right” Size?
This raises an important question. What is the “just right” size when selecting your pharmaceutical equipment?
Review your historical records to track your facility’s growth rate. Has your scope of work increased by a certain percentage over the past few quarters, months, or years? Take this information into account to predict near-future increases in production demands. From there, you can select a machine that can meet your current needs and handle larger future batches.
The Right Equipment for Your Production Team
Beyond selecting the proper-size equipment for your facility, the size of your team and their current internal capacity should help influence your purchasing decisions. For example, two key factors to consider include:
- Desired levels of automation and human operation
- Current size of your team and capacity
Aligning the right tools with the people operating them will result in greater productivity for your facility. This not only boosts efficiency but can also help increase your scope as well as generate bottom-line benefits.
Essential Equipment for Your Facility
Professional-Grade Pharmaceutical Production Equipment
Using professional-grade production equipment ensures a higher-quality finished product more consistently. Without the right machinery to meet demand, the rest of the manufacturing process rapidly loses productivity.
Packaging Machinery
After you’ve finished your production run, you need something to package your fresh product in. Packaging machinery automates this process for you in large quantities so that you can move on to the next phase of your manufacturing cycle.
Popular types of packaging equipment include:
- Rapid channel counters for counting individual units of product
- Conveyors for moving units to their packaging destination
- Dessicant inserters for controlling moisture levels and restricting product movement
- Baggers for containing loose units of product
- Cappers for consistently closing bottle and jar containers
- Blisterpaks for simple and effective single-dose packaging
- Labelers for efficient application to product containers
Proper Quality Control Equipment
Quality control equipment helps your team ensure that you are creating quality consumer products that are safe and effective. Depending on the products you’re manufacturing, quality control equipment can vary in function and purpose.
For example, a water activity meter aids QC professionals in examining water activity levels in gummies, but it would not prove as useful for a dry medium like tablets. Similarly, a hardness tester will not serve any purpose for examining liquid pharmaceuticals.
Should You Buy Used Pharmaceutical Equipment?
Buying used pharmaceutical equipment can help manufacturers save on purchasing costs. However, when you are browsing used listings, be sure that you are working with an established equipment retailer with the knowledge to vet quality used products as well as service or refurbish them to production-ready condition before listing for sale.
Upgrade Your Pharmaceutical Equipment Today
At CapPlus, we are proud to be the leading provider of quality new and used pharmaceutical equipment to manufacturers around the world. We work with facilities of all sizes to help supply them with the exact equipment for their production needs. To learn more, browse our packaging, production, and quality control solutions or request a quote anytime.