In the age of low stock holding and ‘Just In Time’ philosophies, businesses have had to become more time and cost conscious. It’s not just time and money that’s an issue; stock holding comes with other headaches such as a shortfall of stock or unusable stock left over.

One company in the pharmaceutical sector, Advanced Medical Solutions (AMS), faced a similar problem. The many varied shapes and sizes of medical dressings that they provide is a logistical nightmare to manage, as there are many variations of pre-printed sterile pouches on the market. Ordering pre-printed material in the correct volumes caused major problems for AMS with one of the problems being late delivery from the printer; which in turn complicated optimum production schedules.

Hapa, a Swiss-based packaging machinery specialist who already have a large installed base in the UK and Ireland, were brought into AMS to help resolve the problem. HAPA, established since 1933, came up with an innovation that enabled the sachet-style product to be printed and packaged with the product on the same production line. This enabled AMS to become self-sufficient, cutting out the messy pre-printing process and enabling them to take control of their stock holding and production schedule. The system is designed for rapid change over, is format free and can print up to two colours in any Pantone shade. 

Hapa’s UK Director, Roy Taylor states “It’s a fantastic achievement when you can fulfil such a ground-breaking project like this. We have the only machine on the market that can do this and the savings that the client is enjoying are enormous. We have had serious interest from many large businesses, including businesses in the food sector as they have many ‘sachet’ style applications”.

AMS General Manager, Steve Platt, adds “We can now order stock to print and reduce lead times rather than have the many variants that we had before. We will save significant amounts of money a year on packaging materials alone, and the uplift in productivity and reduction in downtime is immense to us.” 

Hapa are now busy speaking to various businesses to improve processes in a similar method.

For more information contact Roy Taylor from HAPA on 01480 414242 or visit www.hapa.ch