Sunday, November 6, 2016

Reasons To Approve Standardization For Tablet Punches And Dies

By Carl Lewis


The pharmaceutical industry is one of those that has the most manufacturing and making of products. Products may vary in form depending on the method of intake. These can be in syrup, tablet, capsule or injected fluids. While this is not an industry monopolized by one big company, you can assure that there are only a few who make medicine with great quality.

Tablet compression was once a manual method, but with the development of technology, manufacturers have found a way to automate the process. This makes assembly line production of tablets and the like easier. Tablet punches and dies are popular machines to assist in tooling.

There has been a call to have similar metrics and specifications for all the machines that are being utilized everywhere. If you are the type that take tablets as form of supplement and medication you would be able to tell that they come in different shapes and sizes. Certain ingredients, apart from the powdered concoction of medicine is mixed with fillers and solidifying substances.

Back then there was a manual way to produce these things. They may even be used for candy and other things that are in tablet form. Machinery called tablet compression tools are needed to do press the tablets and reduce the powder into something that can be taken in with a particular dosage. Two famous standards are used for this namely the Euro ISO and Tablet Specification Manual or the TSM.

These are the European ISO, used in Europe and mostly outside the US and the Tablet Specification Manual standards used by mostly North American Manufacturing. This is a big deal for manufacturers that have plants around the world. Not having a set of the same metrics to follow mean extra expenses. Resources are expended to qualify the product and equipment for it to be allowable in that certain location.

Procurement, maintenance and operation would also be easier for contractor or OEM staff since extra knowledge needed for machine specifications is avoided. This also saves companies from replacement and other fixes since parts for the machine would be easily found. The EOMs who make these parts would also be able to deliver their product faster.

Procurement and maintenance of machinery and part become cheaper for both the pharmaceutical manufacturer and the OEM. This is the benefit of cross compatibility of between equipment parts. The same machinery can now be used in one plant and transported to another without compromising the qualification of the product in the market.

The concept of tablet compression machinery having one standard has been around since the 90s. There was little interest about the matter due to businesses and the nature of competition, but since the middle of the decade, the Euro ISO has been established and started to become widely used outside the US.

There is a call for some standardization for something that is so seemingly minor as nominal punch length, rotation and so on. This allows for better problem solving and addressing issues from one expert to another since there would be no specialized knowledge needed to address the technical difficulty. More importantly the quality of the products made would be uniformed and anything that goes beyond this uniformity can be easily checked and inspected.




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