Pouches help individuals for an easier daily life as patients can trust on the quality and reliability of their individual pouches. Medication centers, pharmacies or hospitals producing those unit or multi dose pouches also need trust – in their machines and the working processes in their facility.

Of course, machine performance plays a big role within this topic as well as error rates, speed and efficiency. Controllers might ask questions like “Where are the inefficiencies in our production?”, “How about our speed compared to the benchmark?” or “How can we prioritize things to plan the workforce of our staff correctly?”. Likewise, another area of interest is the error rate of the canisters, as each error means manual interaction, which is cost and time intense.

Tracking and analytics are well known tools from other businesses like online activities or GPS tracking et cetera. How could this work with pouches and what would be the impact? – Pouch performance tracking should start with the canister and end with the inspection of the ready produced pouch. In this way, the journey of the pill within the pouch production facility would be as transparent as it could be.

One of the leading manufacturers of pouch packaging machines, BD Rowa™, is currently developing a sophisticated analytics tool for this use case with the goal to offer customers more possibilities to exploit the potential of their machine. In a dashboard that combines both machine data and key process figures, customers can learn about inefficiencies in the entire value stream, and they can work precisely on solutions to solve this.

Solutions like this will help in the future for even more patient safety. By identifying inefficiencies, automated pouch production will get even faster and safer. This can result in an increased offer in pouch production which is a benefit for all patients who need medication on a regular basis.