BEST PRACTICE  

Just a blink of the eye

Work at com­puter screens, air con­di­tioning sys­tems and arti­fi­cial light – the need for eye drops is on the rise. The com­pany Rom­melag CMO ensures an aseptic filling process.

It is a sunny summer day, and the past weeks have not brought much rain – the air is even drier in a cli­mate-con­trolled office envi­ron­ment. Strained eyes that have been intently fixed on the screen for hours start to burn. So, you lift your glasses and rub your eyes. The burning sub­sides a bit, but only briefly. Finally, your hand reaches into the left side of the jacket slung over the chair and fum­bles for a small plastic con­tainer. You twist off the cap, bend your head back slightly and put one drop into each eye – finally, there is relief!

Since 1975, Rom­melag CMO site Holo­pack in Sulzbach-Laufen has been working to ensure, among other things, that eye drops in break-proof plastic con­tainers are ready for use in any sit­u­a­tion. The Blow Fill Seal tech­nology (BFS) allows for almost unlim­ited pos­si­bil­i­ties in con­tainer design, indi­vid­u­ally adapt­ableto almost any form of usage and adminis­tration. The fully auto­matic man­u­fac­ture, filling and closing of the units is perform­ed in one oper­a­tional process. The BFS tech­nology offers the highest level of process and product reli­a­bility during aseptic filling.

A tight schedule

Due to rising demand, the par­tially auto­mated pack­aging machine facility has reached its capacity limits. For their expan­sion project around the new ­Pharma 2020 building in Sulzbach-­Laufen, Rom­melag CMO part­nered with Harro ­Höfliger, a sup­plier that offers turn-key lines from product infeed to ready-to-ship carton pack­aging from a single source. The pack­aging line was design­ed to fully meet Rommelag’s product requirements.

When selecting a poten­tial partner, excel­lent ref­er­ences in the GMP envi­ron­ment along with the highest pos­sible machine flex­i­bility was a part of the cri­teria set forth by Marc Hof­mann, Pro­duc­tion Man­ager at Holopack. “With this machine, we want to pro­duce both existing for­mats and prod­ucts for new cus­tomers at the same time,” he explains. Fast project imple­men­ta­tion was also one of the ­cru­cial criteria.

“After com­ple­tion of the project we are very sat­is­fied. The sup­port pro­vided by the Cus­tomer Ser­vice team is per­fect.”Marc Hof­mann, Pro­duc­tion Man­ager at Rom­melag CMO

“A spe­cial chal­lenge was to coor­di­nate and meet the tight schedule, ­since there were only ten months between placing the order with Harro Höfliger and putting the machine into oper­a­tion,” explains Marc Hof­mann. It felt just like a blink of the eye. “We were all the while focusing on inter­di­vi­sional team­work and con­tin­uous com­mu­ni­ca­tion and infor­ma­tion exchange. The high exper­tise of our con­tact per­sons and the very ded­i­cated project man­age­ment team guar­an­teed the suc­cess of our project.”

One of the high­lights for Marc Hof­mann was the new approach in machine qual­i­fi­ca­tion. The qual­i­fi­ca­tion process took place at the Harro Höfliger site and con­sid­er­ably short­ened the assembly and start-up period at Rom­melag CMO. Upon com­ple­tion of the project, the indi­vid­uals respon­sible at Holopack are extremely sat­is­fied. “The sup­port pro­vided by the Cus­tomer Ser­vice team is per­fect. If a spare part is missing, or if a tech­nician is needed, help is usu­ally on­site in about one hour, and pro­duc­tion can be resumed as quickly as pos­sible.” Another joint project is cur­rently underway.

About Rom­melag CMO

Rom­melag CMO, Holopack site with head­quar­ters in Sulzbach-­Laufen (Baden-Würt­tem­berg) was founded in 1976 and is part of the Rom­melag enter­prise group, the inventor of the BFS tech­nology. Holopack is a spe­cialist in the aseptic filling of liq­uids and semi-solid sub­stances on their bot­tlepack machines. Their machines are mainly used in the phar­ma­ceu­tical, chem­ical and food­stuff industries.

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Photos: 123dartist/iStockphoto.com, Stoll von Gáti, vectorfusionart/fotolia.com, Helmar Lünig, Rom­melag CMO