LID ORIENTATION SYSTEM FOR PHARMACEUTICAL PRODUCTION LINE

Abstract

The pharmaceutical industry renders services to people so that it fulfils their health and hygienic needs. The State Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Corporation (SPMC) of Sri Lanka plays a major role in the manufacturing and distribution of medicine within the island. The process of packing and handling medicine must be properly addressed to prevent and control communicable and non-communicable diseases. The manufactured pills need to be packed and placed in anodized pill dispensers. This research is an approach to enhance the efficiency and productivity of a production line in the SPMC by designing and implementing an automated lid orienting process to the existing bottle cleaning machine. SPMC’s lidorienting and cleaning processes are done manually, which require high amount of manual labour. Further, the current process has many inaccuracies. To address this problem, a lid orienting mechanism was introduced to the existing bottle-cleaning process for lid-cleaning as a changeover process, which has a cleaning rate of 52 lids per minute, and an increased efficiency up to 10.93% compared to the manual system. Further, a comparison of the efficiency and cost between conventional and developed system was conducted. In addition, the payback period was calculated to conclude the cost-effectiveness of the developed system to the existing SPMC production line.