Product package efficiency

By Manfred Zurkirch, Dividella AG

“We have seen a clear trend that time to market is an issue”

NGP. How can the supply chain be operated to help combat the fight about counterfeit medicines?
Manfred Zurkirch. There are different philosophies. One of them is making sure that the final patient, the customer, doesn’t get a counterfeit medicine; that’s the easier way. The more complicated one, the full-blown track and trace, is really making sure that not only it doesn’t happen but that if it does, you also find out exactly which type of supply chain it has been done and by whom. This is tricky, and so the pharmaceutical company has to make sure that it has clear control over the distribution channels down to the doctor or the final patient by whatever means. This can be ready in the future via RFID.

I’m skeptical that you can have full technical control until the end. You have to know the ways your products go and have a trust relationship with some of the doctors; otherwise, you can always cheat.

NGP. How can time to market be achieved with the shortest possible changeover time?
MZ. That’s one of the strengths we think of our company, and we have seen, especially in the last few years, that the product batches are getting smaller and smaller. This means that since products are becoming more expensive, they’re more specialized, so pharmaceuticals want to produce package on the same machine, and so they change over several times a day to make sure that they do so just in time. They get an order for a batch of 50 packs, and then they package those, and then the next ones, and so the changeover times on the machines have to be extremely short. For a complete changeover from our machinery, for instancing changing of packaging 5 vials to 10 syringes in combination, this takes about 30-45 minutes.

We have seen a clear trend that time to market is an issue. They build less and less stock, which is also capital, and so they want to really make sure they can package on their machine whatever they want, whenever they want, and changeover and flexibility of the machine is of the essence. Today you buy a syringe machine to package syringes, and in two years maybe you have to package injector pens, so you want to make sure that your equipment which you spend millions on can be retrofitted, and that is its changeover flexibility, that’s the key in the pharmaceutical market today.

NGP. What role does product packaging play in ensuring medicines are safe from counterfeit and tampering?
MZ. Obviously, product packaging plays a major role besides tight control of the distribution channels. The features used on pharmaceutical secondary packaging are many. Dividella can offer features, such as hot melt tamper evidence closure on the TopLoad carton and cardboard tamper evidence features on every single product inside a TopLoad carton. (For instance every single syringe in a multi-syringe presentation is protected individually.)

Other features include the print and/or labelling features on the outer side of the TopLoad carton that are necessary for a real track and trace (this can be data matrix codes, serial numbers, RFID tags etc.) and special marks on the cardboard that enable the final customer to verify where the carton originates from. Normally, these features are defined together with the customer during the packaging development process even before discussion about the machine itself start.

Dr Manfred Zurkirch is Managing Director of Dividella AG which he joined in 2006 from a leading Swiss technology group, where he was Business Unit Manager, and previously VP Marketing & Sales. His expertise covers the capital equipment industry and through his extensive sales activities he has an excellent knowledge of international markets. He previously held various technical and managerial positions in Switzerland’s biggest telecommunications corporation. Zurkirch is a doctorate physicist and he also holds a Master’s degree from a top business school in Paris.

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