French pharmaceuticals company, UPSA, has acquired a Stratasys Fortus 3D printer, working to revitalise its manufacturing workshop whilst reducing costs by 95 percent on some processes, with Stratasys additive manufacturing. The impact on UPSA’s operations has been immediate and positive, with the investment paying for itself within just one year of arrival.
UPSA, part of Bristol-Myers Squibb, identified additive manufacturing as a means to revitalize its in-house workshop and attract the next generation of technicians. UPSA also sees the technology as the key to overcoming production-line challenges, which had previously limited the number of machine parts it was able to make via traditional manufacturing methods.
rédéric Tremoulet, 3D Printer Manager and Mathieu Dumora, UPSA Project Manager, holding 3D printed production tools for the camera mounts
Mathieu Dumora, Project Manager in UPSA’s Technical Department, said: “We identified 3D printing as a possible solution to our needs and made an estimate of all the parts we could 3D print to see if we could save manufacturing costs and reduce our stock of parts. We quickly realised that by using 3D printed parts, we could reduce part weight by 70 percent, which reduces machine wear-and-tear, and has a big impact on productivity and machine longevity.”
UPSA bought a Stratasys Fortus 450mc Production 3D Printer, which proved an immediate success by quickly delivering substantial efficiency savings for critical parts replacement.
Dumora added: “One machine in our manufacturing and packaging line is a heavy cast steel arm, used as part of the operation to grip and suction open a folding carton, so that blister packs can be inserted.”
“These arms are heavy, can become distorted, and sometimes fail and break the machine, but using a 3D printed arm is safer. The ABS-M30i biocompatible 3D printing material can recover if it distorts, but if it breaks, it’s a minimal cost and a short printing time to replace. That’s a huge improvement over a costly steel one. In one year alone, we produced 55 of these parts and made a 95 percent cost reduction on each.”
UPSA also uses its Fortus 450mc Production 3D Printer to build a device to improve the safety of the closure caps for its Efferalgan (paracetamol) for children, after some caps were received from the supplier with particles that could have inadvertently posed a risk of contamination to the medication. The device has proven so successful that UPSA has been able to discontinue the time-consuming and expensive visual inspections that were previously deployed.
“We developed a system that sucks and blows air to remove any particles,” says Dumora. “We test the air suctioned, and even sometimes place particles in caps to test efficacy. Thanks to additive manufacturing, we are able to make this solution ourselves and evolve it through development iterations quickly and cost-effectively.”
Andy Middleton, President, Stratasys Europe, said: “We continue to see an increasing demand for 3D printed tooling, production parts and replacement parts for industrial machinery - the speed at which UPSA has successfully integrated our 3D printer within production and realized such a huge quantifiable ROI, is testament to the way this technology can quickly and cost-effectively overcome production-line challenges for manufacturers in most industry sectors.”
