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32D October 2016 Tablets & Capsules Beyond troubleshooting and training, there's a human element that must be factored in when dealing with capsule filling issues. "Sometimes you have to talk customers off the ledge," Bellio said. "When their customers are waiting on orders and the company can't package it, they start to lose their cool," he said. "The first thing we do is try to calm them down and say, 'Let's look at this thing from all angles.'" Lee recalled an early experience that helps him keep things in perspective. "At my first job in capsule filling, I was running an old Type 8 machine to fill capsules with acti- vated charcoal in a room with no dust collection. The prod- uct was not well formulated. It was very flighty, and I was operating in a black cloud all day long. The charcoal got into every pore of my body," he said. "When I think about difficult days in capsule filling over the last 22 years, my mind always goes back to that. I'm glad it was on the first day, because every day since then has been easier." T&C Reference 1. Empty capsules market analysis and segment fore- casts to 2024. July 2016. Grand View Research. San Francisco, CA. http://bit.ly/GrandTC1016. Further reading Lubricating your capsule filler. Stephen W. Lee. Tablets & Capsules 9 (1) pp. 48. Tips on encapsulating dietary supplements using tamp- ing-style machinery. Jim Moorhead. Tablets & Capsules 6 (1) pp. 22-24. and the outer tamping pins separately to fix weight varia- tions in the inner and outer bores. These two capsule filler advances allow operators to achieve more consistent fill weights." Common mistakes, troubleshooting, and training Machine suppliers like Dr. Pharm and empty capsule suppliers like BioCaps and CapsCanada spend a lot of time troubleshooting their customers' capsule filling operations. Sometimes, problems stem from faulty capsules or machine defects, but more often it is because people make mistakes. One common mistake is to skimp on tooling, Moorhead said. "When dietary supplement manufacturers buy machines, whether expensive or inexpensive, they get one dosing disc, generally the thickest for the biggest size cap- sule they make." Too many companies stop there. "Depending on the bulk density of the material, you should have different discs to handle different materials," he said. "But most companies just run one. They don't want to spend money on more dosing discs. What they don't real- ize is that they're losing money every time they run a prod- uct because the machine won't run properly." Bellio said he traces many capsule filling problems to the inconsistency of the raw materials. Their quality and char- acteristics can vary greatly depending on the time of year and the source. "A customer may get a supply of turmeric that runs great today, but next month they're calling us say- ing there's something wrong with the machine because the turmeric won't pack. When you look at it, the difference in the turmeric is night and day. Last month's had a high mois- ture content and this month it has large particulates. Our job is to help them understand what they're working with and how to adjust their machines based on some powder variations." Another problem is inexperienced operators. "Some companies struggle with operator turnover and training," Lee said. "Maintaining that knowledge-base can be tough for some companies if they're not able to keep their employees around long enough to build on the experience." For that reason, operator training remains in high demand. "About 90 percent of what I do at BioCaps is train- ing," Moorhead said. "We have a training program, specifi- cally for Bosch-type tamping-style machines, where we go over everything from soup to nuts and we follow up with our customers frequently." BioCaps' customers are eligible for training at no additional cost. Lee said that many problems arise because people don't spend time on setup. "In most cases, we're able to resolve a customer's issues by setting up the capsule filling machine properly. Too often, people load the capsules, throw on the powder, make a few tweaks here and there, hit start, and expect the automatic machine will do just fine. But there are a lot of little adjustments that need to be made between dif- ferent types of nutraceutical formulations." Even capsules sourced from different suppliers can affect performance because they have slightly different dimensions, he said. "In a way, there's an art to it." In most cases, customer's issues are resolved by proper equipment setup. Shown here are CapsCanada employees evaluating the perfor- mance of a capsule filling machine.