Ellie Gabel, Associate Editor for Revolutionized explains how cleaning and sterilisation are essential but often unoptimised processes within pharmaceutical facilities.
Doro Guzenda Shutterstock
Minimising contaminant risks is a matter of public safety, but it’s also typically time-consuming, wasteful and prone to error. Automated sterilisation technologies enhance these workflows along several fronts, even when they don’t automate the entire process.
Time savings
The most obvious benefit of automated sterilisation is its efficiency. Pharmaceutical demand is skyrocketing — medicine consumption has grown by 14% since 2019 and will see similar growth in the next four years. Consequently, sanitation-related downtime is a massive barrier in today’s market.
Robots can work far faster than what is humanly possible. Some automated systems can even sterilise themselves between workflows to reduce downtime. Such time savings ensure pharma companies can maintain higher output without sacrificing safety and compliance.
Resource efficiency
Automation is similarly efficient in how it uses resources. Industrial automated washers use significantly fewer cleaning products than their manual alternatives, which is important to pharmaceutical sterilisation for a few reasons.
Most notably, using fewer sanitisers reduces operational expenses. In addition to saving pharmaceutical facilities money, these spending reductions can translate into lower-cost medicines for the public. Robots’ resource efficiency also means they prevent potential side effects from overuse of harsh chemicals, an excess of which may interfere with pharmaceuticals or degrade equipment.
Error reduction
Automated cleaning and sterilisation solutions are also less likely to make mistakes than human workers. Even veteran employees can overlook sanitation steps if they become tired or have to manage large workloads. By contrast, a robot delivers the same level of efficiency and precision with every cycle.
Preventing human error is desirable in any context, but in pharmaceutical sanitation, it directly impacts public safety. Fewer mistakes and oversights in keeping pharma equipment sterile means a lower risk of contamination in final products. Consequently, the customers using these medicines can do so without ingesting potentially harmful material.
Fewer cross-contamination risks
Similarly, robotic cleaning systems do not carry the same cross-contamination hazards as manual workflows. Unlike human employees, robots remain within the sterile facility at all times. As a result, they cannot bring in outside contaminants.
The only buildup that can occur on an automated system is from materials that are already inside the room. As long as their sanitation procedures remain effective — which is more likely in an automated workflow — there’s little to no risk that unwanted foreign particles will collect on machinery and transfer to pharmaceutical products.
Scalability
Pharma businesses should also consider how automating their sterilisation processes can impact future growth. As medicine demand grows, sanitation workflows will need to scale up alongside production. That will be difficult when relying on manual methods, given persistent labor challenges.
Robots can address talent shortages to prevent such limits. A single bot can perform several unfilled roles by virtue of its higher efficiency. As a result, automation lets pharma production scale without a shortage of human labor getting in the way.
Higher sanitation standards demand automation
Sheer output is not the only growing demand facing the pharmaceutical industry. Standards of reliability and safety are also rising, so enterprises within the sector must balance efficiency with thorough sterilisation procedures.
Automation provides an ideal path forward. While investing in this technology will mean some high upfront costs, the impact on long-term affordability, speed, sanitation and safety are worth it.