New French Pharmaceutical Law Poses Printing Challenge

Thermal overprinting onto small size labels (55mm × 35mm maximum) is playing a key role in allowing European pharmaceuticals suppliers to meet specific requirements for the French market, which came into effect at the beginning of 1997.

From January 1, 1997, there was a requirement for a bar coded vignette label to be used for all drugs supplied to the French market that are chemist dispensed. Product and pricing information on the label will enable pharmacists to recover part of the cost of the subsidized drug from the government.

With the highest pharmaceutical consumption in Europe, France's 22,000 community pharmacies and 4,000 hospitals and clinics have a high demand for medicines produced at home and abroad. Because 85% of the total pharmaceutical consumption in France is reimbursed by the Social Security, the government monitors the medicines dispensed and their prices.

The means for doing this is the vignette label which up until now has been a requirement only on certain pharmaceutical products supplied to the French market. The label has to contain product information and have a section giving a code and the price which allows the Social Security to determine at what rate to make the reimbursement - the rates vary according to the specific illness from 35 percent for minor illnesses to 100 percent for very serious.

This label, with its variable information and necessity for high quality print in a small area, presents a number of printing difficulties for pharmaceutical manufacturers in the UK exporting to France. The solutions favored by many manufacturers are to print labels off-line or to use pre-printed labels. Allowance, however, has to be made for information changes, such as expiration dates, so production lines will also need a facility to over-print. Both these processes are inefficient in terms of label wastage and stock control problems.

The ideal option is to cater for both eventualities by installing a printer capable of carrying out both processes at the same time, printing both fixed and variable text labels. Historically, manufacturers have achieved this with rubber ink stereos, which offer a poor quality print and are slow on information changes, or hot foil coders which offer a slightly better quality print but are more expensive. The real drawback of some of these systems is their inability to cope with high speed.

Some manufacturers have gone to thermal printing by installing a desktop printer onto the line. These are not designed for this purpose and can interfere with the label path. What is needed is a thermal printer with high resolution (300 dpi) head and able to cope with high line speeds.

MARKEM has designed the SmartDate, intelligent thermal transfer overprinter to provide a flexible and easy to use method of overprinting variable information onto any pack or label. Utilizing the latest electronics and computer software, SmartDate offers high speed, consistent, clean, high quality printing with simple electronic operator set up - no temperature adjustment, no mechanical alignment and no damaged, worn or dirty type.

American pharmaceuticals manufacturer Bristol-Myers Squibb first installed a SmartDate labeler at its UK Moreton manufacturing site on Merseyside two years ago to replace a hot foil coder on a tablet bottling line and now has another two systems for vignette labels on lines dedicated to the French market.

Until 2 years ago Bristol-Myers Squibb had supplied the French market with cream and ointment from France and when production was transferred to the UK brought over the existing French ink stereo and T slot printing equipment. Tubes are filled with cream or ointment, then packed in individual cartons and a vignette label printed in French is attached to the glossy printed carton on a continuous line. SmartDate was chosen as a direct replacement for the ink stereo printer on the Harland labeler when upgrade became necessary. The compact unit fits in the same space as the existing coder without the need to modify machines.

Andy Sampson, Bristol-Myer Squibb comments, "the first system was chosen to replace an old hot foil printer when we needed a new printer two years ago and wanted to progress to the latest technology. We saw the SmartDate unit in operation and chose it as the most up-to-date printer we could find".

"With the vignette label, a lot of information is required in a small area and SmartDate copes with this better than anything else I have come across. When we put in a second production line for French products a year ago we automatically chose SmartDate for the line also".

The SmartDate prints on a label which is 53mm × l5mm. One line runs at 60 cartons a minute and the second 140 cartons a minute. The label has control and expiry information as well as a product code and price and is in small print so the 300 dpi head is excellent for quality and clarity.

"The flexibility of SmartDate> has enabled our labels to be printed much more quickly and efficiently. The label information has to be changed frequently in terms of the lot number and expiry date and we also change over product on the line," says Andy Sampson. We, therefore, needed a printer that could cope easily with these operations by offering variable as well as fixed text capability. The changeover procedure is simple and we can chose any data to print at the touch of a button".

With complete flexibility for printing variable and real-time information, print designs are easily created at an on-line PC using MARKEM Composer design software to make changes. Operator access to the printer is restricted by key and password.

While product quality and security are the major issues for sophisticated pharmaceutical products, the intelligent SmartDate unit includes a number of important features to make total operation costs attractive to users through minimizing downtime and maximizing productivity. It is easy to program and change code, reliable and easy to maintain with powerful built-in diagnostics including an ultra reliable detection system for end of ribbon to avoid unprinted items.

Automatic high accuracy foil advance and precise indexing of the foil roll with no wastage between lines of print, ensures economic foil usage. A unique MARKEM interlaced print feature allows reduced density printing to further half ribbon cost.

These major time-savings free engineers for more detailed technical work elsewhere on the line. Additionally, in comparison to other alternative traditional coding methods such as hot foil, there is no cost for lost or damaged slugs, no time-consuming replacement of individual digit and character blocks, no warm-up time required. Alternatively, no large stockholding of pre-printed packs is required.

Although the SmartDate> printer is particularly well suited to French vignette requirements, it offers the same cost-effective advantages when in use on production lines supplying other markets in Europe, the Middle-East, Australia and Africa - as Bristol Myers Squibb has found.

MARKEM Corporation is a worldwide leader in providing in-plant printing systems, supplies and services for product marking and decorating, in industries including food packaging, automotive, semiconductors, and pharmaceuticals. With more than 1,500 employees, MARKEM operates from headquarters in Keene, N.H., USA, and at additional manufacturing facilities in England, Australia and Japan. MARKEM has subsidiaries in 12 countries, agents and representatives in 25 other countries.