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Payback brings Nephron fast relief

Nephron production breathes easier with labor-saving wrapping and cartoning lines for its respiratory inhalants that yield a one-year payback.See video

Nephron says the cartoner is 'forgiving' of variances in carton materials.
Nephron says the cartoner is 'forgiving' of variances in carton materials.

As a manufacturer and private-label packager of inhalants for asthmatics, Nephron Pharmaceuticals Corp. knows the value of timely results. Which is what the company receives from major capital improvements to its packaging operations made over the past four years. Those include the latest line, started up last fall. Packaging World’s visit to the operations in Orlando, FL, complete the cost-savings story begun in our September 2003 issue, which detailed the upstream operations (see packworld.com/go/c099). Those operations include blow/fill/seal of low-density polyethylene unit-dose 3-mL vials formed 48 vials/cycle/machine into “cards” of six attached vials.

These new operations comprise flow wrapping, cartoning, and casing. Nephron president Steve Simmons, who retired several months ago, says these parts of the operations initially employed 10 operators/shift for four shifts. With the modernization, only three operators are usually required per line. Based on labor savings alone, Simmons says payback is one year per line. Simmons says the latest startup required only two days’ shakedown.

The line equipment was procured and installed through distributor Wei-Pak. “The delivery time to startup with Wei-Pak was the fastest of any company I’ve ever worked with where entire lines were installed,” says production veteran Eric Heussi, Nephron’s manager of engineering services.

That was despite the fact that the revamped lines had to fit into the available space, a process Simmons compares to a jigsaw puzzle. Wei-Pak has seen to it that all the pieces fit. “Within a week to 10 days of the startup, we were producing at production volumes,” says Heussi. “That’s pretty remarkable.”

The cards are oriented and run through a leak detector before being collated on a stacker mechanism from Westlund Engineering, which provided several pieces of equipment on the line.

A five-high, 30-count stack of cards are conveyed in flights through a Sinlon S.L. Package Machine flow wrapper, built in Taiwan and represented in the United States by Marpak. Simmons characterizes the wrapper as their “smoothest startup” piece of equipment on the line; Heussi adds that it “works beautifully.”

High-accuracy weigher

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