Q&A with Scott Koehler, VP sales & marketing, Elizabeth Carbide Die Co., Inc.
Since its establishment in 1954, Elizabeth has grown to become a global supplier of compression tooling, rotary tabletting services and blister packaging tooling/feeding solutions. The company’s range of technologies encompasses Elizabeth Carbide Die compression tooling, Elizabeth Scheu & Kniss replacement parts and services, Elizabeth-Hata tablet presses and Elizabeth-Europe blister feeding solutions.
Q: What does your role involve?
A: I’m responsible for global sales and marketing leadership.
Q: Elizabeth is involved in a range of sectors — including pharmaceutical, battery, powdered metal, energy and power, automotive and metal forming — how important and what percentage of business is pharma?
A: The pharma and nutritional sectors are very important to our business, representing roughly half of annual turnover. Many innovations are driven by our interactions with pharma and nutritional customers focusing upon their product assurance and total cost of operation.
Q: What has been the latest product launch for the pharmaceutical market?
A: We recently introduced Eliza-Press, a new series of manually operated tablet presses. Eliza-Press offers a simple, reliable and cost-effective way to produce R&D- and medium-scale batches. Eliza-Press is borne from our three decades’ experience with high-speed Hata rotary tablet presses. Our new Eliza-Press 400 double-sided press was on display for the first time at this month’s interpack tradeshow in Düsseldorf.
Q: What are the current tablet tooling trends?
A: More for less. Elizabeth is routinely working with customers to improve their production yields and production rates and extend useful lifetime of their tooling. Through CIP (continuous improvement project) efforts, our engineering and customer service staff identify opportunities to enhance performance in any or all three areas. While design improvements directly impacting performance may seem clear, the pathway to implementation is not always direct as we comprehend and support customer change control obligations.
Another recent trend involves the stricter federal agency guidelines concerning the use of functional tablet bisects. Tablet bisects are no more simply product trade-dress but must serve an intended purpose of dose partitioning. Again, our engineering staff collaborates with pharma manufacturers to design the necessary level of tooling precision yet with an eye towards operational robustness.
Q: How does Elizabeth ensure that pharma customers’ needs are consistently met? (for example, what are the biggest issues faced by tabletting customers and what role does Elizabeth play in helping to solve these?)
A: I think the biggest challenge for our pharma customers is meeting global demand for cost-effective medicines, delivered securely and timely to every corner of the world. Our customers endeavour to provide incredible value in terms of patient quality of life and treatment outcomes yet need to respond to the fiscal constraints driven by consolidated supply chains and governmental initiatives to expand access to quality care.
Q: What do you believe Elizabeth is able to offer its pharma clients over its competitors?
A: In the simplest term, Elizabeth offers passion — we are passionate about our customer relationships, we are passionate about our customers’ success, and we are passionate about our integrity. Elizabeth celebrates its 60th anniversary in 2014 and we are globally positioned to service our customers from manufacturing facilities on three continents.