Sustainable streamlining
CIM develops software solutions for production lines. One of its niches is the pharmaceutical industry, where the company is renowned for its drive when it comes to introducing new technology that ensures productivity and compliance with strict rules.
Innovative technology
For CIM, the focus is on developing solutions that will optimise its customers’ production processes. These customers contact CIM with ideas relating to improvements that can e.g. save time or minimise the amount of waste.
“The customer may not have the resources to develop new concepts, machines and algorithms. They turn to us, and we try to help them. This might entail building a robot equipped with cameras or supplying models for deep learning. We mostly work with software, although our deliveries sometimes also include physical machines,” says Anders Rohde, Site Manager at CIM.
Efficient and sustainable labelling
One customer enquiry resulted in CIM launching an initiative aimed at digitalising labelling and making the labelling of pharmaceuticals more sustainable and efficient.
“Despite this being an apparently simple task, there are several challenges when it comes to producing and handling labels, such as availability, material consumption and changing the production set-up,” says Anders. “Labelling is a critical part of pharmaceutical manufacture, and so it is also an important area to develop.
The traditional way of handling product labelling is to print static data on labels, such as logos and product information, prior to the manufacturing process. Dynamic data, such as the expiry date, is printed towards the end of each product run.
“Let’s assume that a company sells five different pharmaceutical products to 200 countries. For these products, information must be provided in the local language, which means that 1,000 different labels have to be printed. The products are much more expensive than the labels, so the dealers tend to buy large batches of ready-printed labels – if the correct label is missing, the product in question cannot be sold. However, labels have a limited useful life and there is therefore a large amount of waste,” says Anders.
The most important element when handling labelling is changing over the production set-up. This phase normally entails extensive manual work.
“A single machine or production line might handle many different products for different countries. Between the production rounds, the operator has to manually change labels from one product or one country to another. This is a time-consuming process that gives rise to long operational downtime, which in turn lead to lost income,” emphasises Anders.
Everything happens in the printer
The relatively complex situation relating to supplying labels, material consumption and performing changeovers required a more sustainable approach that served to improve efficiency.
“Just imagine if we could print both static information and dynamic data in the same printer as part of the manufacturing process? The only thing we would need to stock then would be white labels. Using the same label for all the products and adding all the information at the same time means that everything happens in the printer. Integrated digital printing is tackling these challenges and delivering sustainable handling,” rounds off Anders.