On top of packaging

More pharmaceutical products are produced in parenteral form, which boosts demand for topload packaging solutions. Dividella’s Manfred Zurkirch explains how the company produces strong, cost-effective packaging and extends the lifecycle of manufacturing machinery.

The packaging of a parenteral, like any pharmaceutical product, is an important part of its commercial success. As well as being durable and easy to store, package designs must be user-friendly if the product is to stand out in an increasingly competitive market. According to Dr Manfred Zurkirch, managing director of pharmaceutical packaging specialists Dividella, top-loading technology has the versatility to fulfil all of these needs. With 40 years’ experience in the pharmaceutical industry, Dividella is a leader in the secondary packaging of ampoules, vials, syringes and other difficult-to-stack medical devices. The company specialises in developing cardboard-only packaging solutions and the machines on which they are produced.

“Over the last 20 years we have been developing top-loading or cardboard-only packaging,” Zurkirch says. “The outside box is cardboard, but on the inside there are cardboard partitions instead of plastic trays.”

Single-material benefits
The benefits of this single-material method are numerous. The box and partition are formed on a single machine, which greatly reduces manufacturing costs. The packaging material is supplied in flat carton and partition blanks and therefore takes up minimal stacking space. Furthermore, the cardboard partition provides product protection benefits such as eliminating glass-to-glass contact and, with it, the cost accrued from damaged cargo. “If you take the average ten-syringe pack, it isn’t untypical to save 50% of the volume using our solution,” Zurkirch explains.

“For products such as oncology drugs, we design the boxes in conjunction with the customer. This process results in packaging that you can throw on the floor, with the product remaining intact.”

The company’s top-loading method has also proved popular with end users. With increasingly more numbers of products going over the counter, presentation and user-friendliness have become vital from a marketing perspective. “With cardboard you can always print the inside of the box and once opened you have an easy overview in a nicely displayed fashion,” Zurkirch says. “It is important that the customer can see that everything is there, take something out, put something back in – this is much more difficult with a side-loader. Once you pull it out of the box, you can’t stuff it back in the same way.”

Close relationship
Dividella designs all of its machines and products in close collaboration with its customers throughout the package design, manufacturing and marketing process. This is particularly advantageous in an industry where many players have extensive packaging portfolios and need boxes that fulfil the requirements of the product, yet are uniform in appearance. In addition, all of the company’s packaging is sustainable, environmentally friendly, and fully compliant with pharmaceutical industry regulations.

“The advantage of working with us is that we are not just a design office,” Zurkirch explains. “Our approach of working within the parameters set by our customers allows us to maximise the operational efficiency of the machine, which saves a lot of money.” Although Dividella’s designs are carefully customised, the company puts a premium on adaptability. Its machines can be easily retrofitted, giving them a much longer shelf life than competing products. In Zurkirch’s view, this is one of the company’s major advantages.

“If someone just buys on a price basis, then we are out of the equation,” he says. “Our savings are in raw material flow and transport flow, as well as in the asset protection offered by our machines. Sometimes a company will buy a machine for a product and the product isn’t approved or doesn’t take off as expected. We will retrofit it for them. In fact, 50% of our machines currently on the market don’t look the same as when we sold them.”

Strength in innovation Over the medium term, Zurkirch sees South America and Russia, in which parenterals are already commonplace, as being potential growth markets. For now, though, Dividella will continue to consolidate in its main area of strength. The company already provides machinery for the majority of the 20 biggest pharmaceutical firms, and will try to bring the remainder onboard by placing innovation at the centre of its strategy.

“The requirements of the pharmaceutical industry are changing,” Zurkirch says. “We just want to keep up to date and always be one step ahead of the competition when it comes to innovation. We want to build business cases for our customers so they can say, ‘ok, this investment is well worth it’.”

Company profile

Dividella

For further information, visit:
www.dividella.com