Coordinating disciplines

PharmaPack Asia Limited is a packaging machinery company that was established in 2001 in Hong Kong. The company is dedicated to the marketing, development, design, manufacturing, installation, debugging and after-sales service of pharmaceutical packaging equipment. Its products include an automatic tablet/capsule packaging line, end-of-the-line packaging line and ink-jet printing machine, a particle inspection machine and labeler. In October 2002, PharmaPack established its manufacturing facility, PharmaPack Packaging Equipment Co., Ltd (PharmaPack), in the Guangzhou Economic and Technological Development District.

The single-floor and low-volume model adopted by packaging machinery enterprises requires engineers to customize design solutions to meet the unique requirements of every customer. Generally, the packaging device involves machinery, electronics and other areas of expertise, which means the product design and research and development (R&D) teams must be divided by disciplines. It is critical that data flows seamlessly between the teams to guarantee smooth R&D, production and machining processes. The R&D process is challenging because it is not under the sole control of the production and machining enterprise. The packaging equipment purchaser must also participate in the R&D process and confirm certain key tasks, such as the first design examination, design review, delivery testing, transportation and production. As a result, the company must establish a sound project management system to effectively facilitate R&D projects. That’s why it was so important for PharmaPack to deploy a product lifecycle management (PLM) solution.

“Integrating seamlessly”

PharmaPack implemented Solid Edge® software, a Siemens Digital Industries Software solution, as its global product development platform shortly after the founding of the company. While Solid Edge provides a strong computer-aided design (CAD) tool, PharmaPack found that its designers needed a way to facilitate collaboration, especially when dealing with a large volume of design data.

But as the company sought a more effective approach to data management, especially for search and version control of the design data, it realized that to leverage the full value of its CAD system, it would need a PLM solution to achieve a fully standardized business process.

After evaluating several options, PharmaPack settled on Teamcenter® software, a PLM solution, also from Siemens Digital Industries Software. Based on the powerful search function and version control capability of Teamcenter, PharmaPack found that its engineers could find the re-usable design data quickly, allowing them more time to focus on designing and creating better products.

Prior to the implementation of Teamcenter, the product information and data produced by Solid Edge could not be reviewed, approved and released electronically, meaning it had to be transferred manually, a laborious and error-prone process. In addition, any change to product data could not be synchronized with the company’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, making effective project management almost impossible. However, using Teamcenter in conjunction with Solid Edge changed all of that.

Now, PharmaPack’s designers are carrying out product development and design activities with Teamcenter, which is used to manage all 2D drawing data and design changes. With Teamcenter, PharmaPack has reduced the R&D design cycle by 17 percent and shortened production preparation time by 20 percent.

“Teamcenter and Solid Edge integrate seamlessly, supporting a single data source and effectively guaranteeing data accuracy,” says Qi Xianjun, deputy general manager of PharmaPack (Guangzhou). “They provide extensive and scalable CAD and PDM (product data management) functions, and are able to meet our business requirements across different levels of complexity.”