Overview

A large Clinical Diagnostics company, focused on quality control products and informatics solutions, sourced Catalyx’s Vial Counter to transform their vial production process. Their aim was to introduce greater quality control measures to their production process and reduce, by at least 50%, the time and costs associated with the vial counting and batch reconciliation processes. The customer’s production site is filling 150 batches of vials per year and is consuming up to 1,883 hours annually in the manual counting of vials and the reconciliation of the batches. 

Through the implementation of the Vial Counter, the digital transformation of the customer manual vial counting and reconciliation process, saves over 50% of the time and costs in the current process, whilst increasing the automation ratio. The resulting process efficiency savings increase the OEE of the manufacturing line whilst directly reducing production costs. 

Customer Outcomes Achieved 

The single stand-alone portable Catalyx Vial Counter reduces the time spent on reconciliation for all four lines by over 50%. Using one single solution, the organization will increase its quality control process across all 4 lines, using the vial counting solution that can: 

– Easily move between production lines

– Built in support for full spectrum of vial colors in customer product range

– Allow rapid changeover for the counting of trays of different sizes and vials of different sizes

Solution 

The Catalyx Vial Counter provides a standalone vial counting station, eliminating vial counting errors, whilst reducing the time taken to count vials by up to 50% when compared to typical manual vial counting and reconciliation procedures. The system could give the business back approximately 1,500 hours of additional production capacity in the first year equating to 70 extra batches with an average size of 800 litres. 

With a current production capacity of 200 batches annually, the time savings provided by the Vial Counter is sufficient enough to remove the need to deploy additional fill lines within a 5 year window, based on a 15% year-on-year growth of batch production.  

Through the provision of the all in one Vial Counting station, utilizing state of the art vision algorithms, the Catalyx Vial Counter provides an automated vial counter to accelerate batch reconciliation and ensures that accurate counts are recorded and audit-able throughout the vial production process.  

The customer can be rest assured that the time it takes to carry out their large batch reconciliation process will be significantly reduced and that 2 of the 3 people currently deployed to manually carry out this task can be re-deployed elsewhere in the organization to carry out higher value tasks.