How is the current environment for automation in pharma?
|
Sameer Gandhi
|
With the pharmaceutical industry doing well in India, automation level is going to grow. New FDA regulations will be an impetus to the industry to invest more in automation. New rules on track and trace and serialisation require automation so its good news for automation industry, not only for new machines but also for old ones. Of all the sectors automation finds use in, the requirement by design in pharma is more stringent because here we are dealing with the lives of patients. So the accuracy and liability factor is very high.
How is automation helping companies be energy efficient?
When we look at energy reduction or optimisation, it is not about how less do you consume for a given amount of time. We need to look at how much did you produce with a given amount of energy and what does that include. Does that include reducing wastage, increasing throughput, increasing the right quality of? That is where precise automation solutions come in: like PID loops for temperature control, camera systems for reading barcodes and OCRs that work on high speeds, cameras which can detect foreign particles in medicines (absence and presence detectors). Track and trace means that both detection and recording needs to be done. That again can be done at very high speeds. All these technologies from Omron help companies to increase throughput.
How do you see the move towards stringent regulations?
Stricter regulations means more opportunity to help our customers, with better and more secure automation systems. For example, cameras have been around since 1980s, but the image detection has changed. Earlier we could only detect whether the label is there or not. Now we can read the dates and do an OCR and then decide what is getting printed is correct or not. Industry requirements are changing and hence it spurs us to do a value addition on the products. Safety was all about presence detection earlier, but in high speed machines today we have improvised to safety scanners, which work at varying speeds. In track and trace, as the data is captured on every bottle (the unique 3D code printed) it gets recorded on a relational database. Our new PLC systems can directly transfer the data to the RDBMS/ ERP/SQL server. There is no intervening layer. So we are trying to simplify and reduce the no of layers involved. Less complexity, lesser chances of failure.
How have you been innovating and what trends do you see going forward?
Everytime a customer comes to us with a new requirement, it gives us the impetus to innovate. For eg, we are working with a client who makes machines to manufacture capsules. The requirement is that sometimes capsules crack. They want us to detect the cracks while manufacturing. We launched Scara robot- pick and place robots and are seeing a good response for them from the industry. In the immediate future robotisation would be a trend. With an increasing demand, machine speeds will increase, making some functions unsafe or impossible for human beings, hence the shift to robots.
In the future, the trend is going to be towards wireless devices. We’ll see more and sensors which are unconnected, basically powered using ambient energy such as vibration, heat or light. Such wire free devices won’t even need power supply or batteries. They can be in remote locations, where wiring would be very cumbersome.
Tell us about the new automation centre launched in Mumbai.
This is the first such centre in India and the fifth in the world and indicates the strategic position India holds in Omron’s business plans. Here customers can experience our products as we offer live demo of our products. We have a vision lab and test samples for our customers depending on their requirements. This is a unique concept where we can simulate the applications for customers. It cuts down their development time for a new machine, as well as if they want to make some iterations in an existing machine. We have a connectivity lab. Multiple devices from multiple vendors need to communicate with other which can be a challenge. Before going to the field, we can test this out in the labs, develop a software, so that during commissioning it doesn’t cost the customer time.