"After this set of equipment was put into operation, our packaging qualification rate increased by 0.8 percentage points." In the packaging workshop of a well-known pharmaceutical company in North China, production supervisor Zhang Gong said with emotion, pointing to the silver equipment in operation. The "hero" he mentioned is the third-generation automatic metering packaging machine newly developed by ply-pack. This equipment has recently set off a purchasing boom in the pharmaceutical industry, and the order schedule has been extended to the first quarter of next year.
Walking into the solid preparation workshop of a biopharmaceutical company in Jiangsu, three automatic metering packaging machines are running stably at a speed of 120 bags per minute. The high-precision sensor built into the equipment can monitor the filling deviation in real time. When it is detected that the filling volume of a batch of capsules fluctuates by more than ±1%, the system will automatically trigger an alarm and record the deviation data. This characteristic of being meticulous is the core consideration for pharmaceutical companies to choose automatic metering and packaging machines. In a production environment that strictly implements GMP specifications, traditional manual sampling methods can no longer meet the increasingly stringent drug packaging standards.
The innovation of this equipment lies in the deep integration of dynamic weighing technology and AI vision system. In the packaging process, the material is evenly distributed through the three-stage vibrating screen and enters the metering module composed of 64 precision weighing units. This system can achieve a metering accuracy of 0.01 grams. What is more noteworthy is its self-developed compensation algorithm, which can automatically calibrate the metering parameters according to the changes in ambient temperature and humidity to ensure that the packaging accuracy remains stable under continuous operation.
Faced with the surge in order demand, the ply-pack supply chain team innovatively adopted the "modular pre-installation + on-site assembly" delivery model. Key components such as metering sensors and servo control systems are pre-debugged in the constant temperature workshop in advance and delivered directly to the customer site in a special transport box. This model shortens the equipment installation cycle by 40% compared with the traditional method. A listed pharmaceutical company completed the production line transformation within 72 hours after the equipment arrived at the factory, successfully catching up with the transformation window period before the implementation of the new version of the Pharmacopoeia.
As the pharmaceutical industry accelerates its intelligent upgrade, automatic metering and packaging machines are evolving from single equipment to the center of intelligent production lines. The latest models have the function of direct connection with the MES system, which can upload packaging data to the enterprise quality management system in real time. In a vaccine manufacturer in Hangzhou, the digital packaging matrix constructed by six networked automatic metering and packaging machines has compressed the packaging data traceability time for each batch of products from 3 hours to 15 minutes.
The setting sun shines through the glass curtain wall of the workshop, casting fine spots of light on the metal surface of the automatic metering and packaging machine. After completing the last inspection procedure, operator Xiao Li signed his work number on the electronic board. This "smart weighing officer" that carries the ingenuity and technological wisdom of pharmaceutical people is quietly reshaping the quality boundaries of pharmaceutical packaging in countless such daily scenes.
