SSI Schäfer carries out "the project of the century" for the pharmaceutical industry in Eastern Europe

SSI Schäfer, integral solutions for intralogistics specialist, has strengthened its position of leader in the countries of Eastern Europe, with the completion of two facilities for the pharmaceutical industry in Poland and Slovenia.

The Slovenian pharmaceutical company Lek, known internationally and with headquarters in Ljubljana (Slovenia), has been awarded to SSI Schäfer planning and implementation of their complex distribution warehouse. This project of great dimension, includes on the one hand, the installation of a warehouse of high altitude in Strykow, Poland, and on the other hand, the redesign and reconstruction of existing high-rise of the same store headquarters central of Lek, in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

The main feature of these two projects is the development of a system of maintenance that would be able to adapt to the usual requirements of cleaning in the pharmaceutical industry, as well as allowing efficient and automatic access to a wide variety of products.

It is to comply with this last objective that SSI Schäfer has provided each stores of high altitude with a change of aisle racking system.

Lek is a company belonging to the Sandoz group, which operates as a Business Center of the Group Novartis generics, one of the world leaders in the development and manufacture of pharmaceutical products. Its business mainly covers the markets of Central, Southeast and Eastern Europe, and is focused mainly in countries such as Poland, Russia, Slovenia, Balkan while increasingly diversified into EE.UU.

The Polish delegation in Strykow, near Lodz, has been chosen as the main hub for the production, storage and supply in the economic area of Eastern Europe.

The high volume of investment carried out in recent years in the community of Strykow, in addition to this new large-scale project, classified as a "project of the 21st century" by the management of Lek, have turned the city into one of the centres of production and logistics Eastern Europe's most modern. In the logistics complex, which stretches over an area of 25,000 m2, administrative buildings, development laboratories, production lines, and high-rise warehouses were installed in record time.

The objectives of the "project of the century" were clearly defined.

(v) optimize and automate the flow of material to reduce the error rate to zero.

(v) reduce the costs of storage

(v) improve the quality of the supply of Lek and increase the effectiveness of the processes of warehousing, distribution and delivery through a quick availability of the stored products.

Strykow, Poland, was the construction of the SILO to 8,200 positions of palettes to simple depth, with loads of up to 600 kg, in a short space of time. Note the use of a change of aisle racking system operating in the five aisles of the store's high altitude, which imposed the integration of a collision prevention system, to ensure that the racking conduct 24 double cycles per hour without any impact. In addition, SSI Schäfer installed 125 metres of road rollers and chains, lifting systems for pallets, bunchers and desapiladores of palettes, rotary tables to 90º, vehicle transfers, as well as vertical pallet lifts. Lek logistics complex has been designed to ensure a production capacity of 1.5 billion tablets and capsules only in the first year.

The real challenge of the project focused on the combination and coordination of the multiple streams of material. In Skytrow, raw materials, the intermediate and finishing are stored together. Raw materials are recorded, stored, and in turn, at the disposal of the production areas, heavy and processed. The semimanufactured products are stored, requested from the production lines, heavy and processed as finished products. When they reach the automatic system of packaging, they are processed and stored again in the area of finished products and remain there until its supply.

The usual clean rooms in the pharmaceutical industry and equipment of laboratories require the use of components that must meet very strict and clearly defined rules. In establishing the amount of particles which, at most, can be rid of the component of a machine. The lower is the amount of pollutants, both cleaner is the team.

Therefore, the main feature of this project lies in the development of a system of maintenance to meet increasingly stringent cleaning standards imposed by the pharmaceutical sector in manufacturing processes.

To accomplish this, SSI Schäfer has developed a technology especially suitable for clean rooms and it has been installed in some areas a maintenance system equipped with a smooth surface, of chains free of maintenance and equipment especially suitable for dirt-free environments.

In addition, to prevent the entry of particles within the areas of production, SSI Schäfer has integrated air barrier systems for depression by dragging the particles outwards from these areas. In this way, the raw material comes to production without having been contaminated.

To complete the project, SSI Schäfer has also implemented the appropriate it infrastructure to support the system of control of flows of material, through the installation of the ANT software, completely reliable and efficient. This information system is especially designed for rapid management of orders and a complete visualization of the operations. ANT covers 80% of the functionalities required by the market. So logistical tasks, such as the management of entry of goods, the optimization of storage locations, the consolidation of orders, or a permanent inventory of the stock not needed long work of programming or parameterization during the start-up phase underway.

However, the operation of the ANT in Lek software, has been limited to the central areas of control of material flow, preparation of orders, and visualization.

ANT is connected to the existing SAP of the client, which deals with strategies for storage of raw materials, semifinished and finished according to customer's special requirements.