From automation to packaging design: a line for pharma

Cama is now strengthening its commitment in the healthcare and pharmaceutical sector, where secondary packaging is becoming an essential part of the drug production and delivery system. Among the recent company projects, a “Break-Through” line for packaging  stickpacks into special 3-flap boxes

CAMA is a Worldwide Leader in the supply of complete, turnkey end of line packaging and robotics solutions for Food and Non Food Industries.
Thanks to over 35 years of experience, Cama designs and manufactures state-of-the-art packaging solutions perfectly tailored around product and process specifications.
The latest Break-Through Generation equipment features the most advanced packaging technology, enabling a higher hygiene standard, safe and ergonomic design, reduced footprint, user-friendly operation, easy size changing. High production speeds and reliability are aligned with sustainable engineering technology, delivering reduced waste, lower maintenance costs, reduction in number of components and minimization of electrical and air power consumption.
The use of single serve sachets for the distribution of drugs and remedies in either powder and/or granulated form is an ever growing sector within the healthcare and pharmaceutical markets. Single portion sachets or stickpacks are an alternative to tablet which provides benefits to the end-user according to the products’ chemical and physical characteristics.
To respond to these trends, Cama has implemented specific packaging solutions starting from flat blanks instead of pre-glued cartons, allowing greater flexibility and lower overall cost of packaging. 
An example of this is a complete line recently designed and sold to a major biopharmaceutical multinational, where Cama’s packaging machine will load stickpacks of single serve powders into a special flip-top box design.
The challenge for this project was to offer the pharmaceutical manufacturer a turn-key solution, incorporating packaging development, with the special box design: first of all traceability requirements for the product and packaging, but also other quality control measures required by the segment, as well as leaflet/booklet dispensing. 

The line in practice
Cama integrated all the individual devices of the line with its state of the art machines, incorporating multi-head robotic forming; multiple vision-driven delta robotic loading cell; and multi-head robotic closing unit.The robotic forming machine is designed to work over a wide range of boxes and includes advanced features like automatic adjustment of glue guns and automatic recognition of the size parts to be replaced.
Each box is individually detected at the moment of the pick-up from the magazine and the relevant code is checked in real time to ensure full traceability of the packs and avoid any potential mismatch related to magazine filling by operators.
The vision driven robots allow for the handling of individual sachets, these are able to adapt to any misalignment or uneven flow of the stickpacks from the upstream equipment. The key benefit of this handling technique is the possibility to cover a wide range of different pack counts, in this case from 8 up to 50 sachets per pack, in various loading configurations.
A leaflet/booklet dispenser has been integrated in order to feed all the additional papers required for regulatory compliance for the final selling unit. The same robots that are doing the sachet placing into boxes will also load the booklets.
The robotic closing unit, using the same principle and robot of the forming module, provides a positive and reliable closing operation of the cartons.
What is more, as opposed to a traditional machine, the system conceived by Cama performs all the closing operations with boxes standing still, to allow for a perfect alignment of all the flaps and more consistent quality of closing due to the static nature of the boxes and more even application of pressure across the glued areas.
A reminder lastly that the robotic Cama packaging line, thanks to its innovative “Break-Through” construction, offers the operators a high level of accessibility, with complete visibility over all the line modules. 
Safe and ergonomic line access, combined with state of the art of hygienic design represent Cama’s leading position in the packaging machinery market.