What does good old moo juice have to do with pharmaceutical manufacturing? Many drugs contain milk-derived ingredients, but that’s not the only connection between the two industries. You might be surprised that your pharmaceutical operation can learn a lot from dairy processing facilities. Here are four lessons from the milk production industry that can help make your pharmaceutical plant cleaner, more efficient, and more profitable.
Dairy stands head and shoulders above other industries in its use of automation. Automating processes reduces expenses, increases product yield, and saves time. Although you might be wary about switching the sensitive tasks involved in manufacturing pharmaceuticals from human control to machines, automation can actually improve task accuracy because technology doesn’t suffer from fatigue, hunger or illness like human workers often do.
Dairy brick is the common name for a type of sterile, durable, and cost-effective brick, but its use isn’t limited to dairies. If you need to maintain a sterile environment, dairy brick may be the perfect solution for you. Made from chemically resistant high-silica shale, this material can reduce contamination in your facility. Although dairy brick is exceptionally durable, it’s important to call in a dairy brick repair contractor if you notice any cracks because damage can compromise sterility by allowing contaminants to seep through the surface.
Although quality control in the pharmaceutical industry is strict, these tight controls often generate excess wastage because they’re applied post-production instead of earlier in the manufacturing process. Dairy processing, on the other hand, exercises quality control upfront to catch and remedy problems before the final product rolls off the line. Standardized testing procedures and quality regulations can keep your production batches on track so fewer products have to be tossed out.
The cold chain is how certain products are kept at an appropriate temperature through each stage of production and distribution. This is obviously of great importance to the dairy industry, but many of your pharmaceutical products like vaccines and injectable medications are also sensitive to temperature and must be kept cold. Adopting cold chain management technologies from dairy processing can help extend the shelf life of these products and improve their quality.
Although pharmaceutical manufacturing can learn a lot from dairy processing, keep in mind that these are still two very different industries. Remember that not every procedure used in dairy processing can be applied to your own operations and try not to make too many direct comparisons.
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