Contract Manufacturer Avoids Increased Costs & Labor Costs With Inspection System

By Rusty Nelson, General Manager, Daiichi Jitsugyo America, Inc.

A contract manufacturer was producing a coated, controlled release tablet for initial product launch, but encountered problems with the printing of product information on each tablet. Their customer was very particular about both the appearance of each tablet and the clarity of information that was to be visible on each tablet. If the tablets could not pass a rigid inspection, batches of the product would be rejected, at cost to the manufacturer of $150,000 per batch, until a satisfactory appearance could be achieved. The manufacturer would have to either re-inspect the batches to meet their customer’s stringent requirements, or face remanufacturing entire batches.

Not only were these products new to the market, the high-speed printing process had not been used before and the print quality on the coating of the tablet was inconsistent. The first batches of the new product were inspected manually, which proved to be slow, expensive and relatively inaccurate, as the first batches were returne by the customer because they did not meet specifications.