Packaging line efficiencies

The term mechanical efficiency, as used by production departments, identifies the mechanical reliability in a percentage of aU the components that make up the packaging line. The components of a packaging machine must start, run, stop, reset and restart, reliably, thousands of times before actual packaging of the product is complete. The basis on which many machinery manufacturers state that their machine has an efficiency rating of 100% is often based on a time-limited test run of the customer s product under a controlled condition and not under actual production requirements. It is critical that packaging machine manufacturers understand and state the reliability of all the components of a machine, how many components compose each machine, and how the components interact with each other throughout the whole machine cycle. 

There appears to be no pharmaceutical industry standard for measuring the efficiency of a packaging line. Line efficiency has been defined as the ratio of output to input, but a better measure is the ratio of the actual operating time (the actual time producing acceptable product) divided by the available time (when there is work available for the line) expressed as a percentage. 

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