It was exactly 30 years ago that the Swedish com­pany Mölnlycke launched its Safetac^® tech­nology for dress­ings. A con­tact layer with sil­i­cone adhe­sion ensures that the patch rests firmly on the skin, but can be removed gently. Removing the patch is less painful for the patient com­pared to con­ven­tional adhe­sive prod­ucts. When removing the dressing, there is no tissue trauma either, which is ben­e­fi­cial for wound healing.

Mölnlycke Health Care pro­duces more than 100 mil­lion mul­ti­layer border prod­ucts of the Mepilex^® product line per year – mainly in Maine, US and in Mikkeli, Fin­land. The loca­tion in Fin­land, about a two-hour drive from Helsinki, is rich in tra­di­tion, and in recent years it has become a state-of-the-art, high-per­for­mance pro­duc­tion facility, in par­tic­ular for high-tech prod­ucts for dressing wounds.

Every day, con­tainers full of wound dress­ings leave the facility and are sent all over the world. Mikkeli has also a research and devel­op­ment depart­ment in order to imple­ment product improve­ments in close coop­er­a­tion with and prox­imity to production.

“For the pro­duc­tion and pack­aging line, it was impor­tant for us to have a lot of flex­i­bility in the con­fig­u­ra­tion, a wide variety of pos­sible for­mats and short changeover times in order to switch quickly between our var­ious prod­ucts,“ says Timo Saahko, Gen­eral Man­ager and Man­aging Director of the Mikkeli pro­duc­tion facility. “Time to market is of essence, there­fore the line should be easy to modify so that we can process the mate­rials of the future as well as today‘s prod­ucts at any time. We have been working with Harro Höfliger for more than a decade, and we are sure that the com­pany is the right partner for this task.“

“We have been working with Harro Höfliger for more than a decade, and we are sure that the com­pany is the right partner for this task.” Timo Saahko, Gen­eral Man­ager and Man­aging Director of Mölnlycke‘s Mikkeli pro­duc­tion facility

Future via­bility has always been a spe­cialty of Harro Höfliger’s mod­ular PMK setup. What is new about this line, how­ever, is its layout: To accom­mo­date in as com­pact a space as pos­sible the numerous sta­tions for the com­plex pro­duc­tion and pack­aging processes, the deci­sion was made for a two-story system. The high-speed line is more than five meters tall. On the upper floor, the var­ious web mate­rials are auto­mat­i­cally unwound and wound up: mul­ti­layer lam­i­nate, wound pads made of foam mate­rial, Safetac^® wound con­tact layer, release liner and the pack­aging mate­rial for the sachets.

Pack­aging takes place in the lower area. The wound pads are cut out exactly using cut & place and placed on the car­rier film. After lam­i­na­tion of the dif­ferent layers of film and con­fec­tioning, the patches are indi­vid­u­ally packed in pouches. Numerous camera sta­tions mon­itor the processes and ensure, among other things, that the pouches are cor­rectly printed with all batch-rel­e­vant data and with the UDI code for track & trace. At the end of the line, all prod­ucts in per­fect con­di­tion are stacked and moved to packaging.

For Timo Saahko the high-tech two-­story line is an invest­ment in the future of Mölnlycke: “To set up the system, the hall roof had to be raised. It was worth it: The line is effi­cient and, thanks to its mod­ular setup, offers us long-term pro­duc­tion reli­a­bility for our cur­rent and future patch prod­ucts.“ Mölnlycke has since acquired addi­tional two-story lines from Harro Höfliger, each of which effec­tively can pro­duce border prod­ucts in three shifts.

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Photos: Helmar Lünig, Mölnlycke