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Consumable A/pH Sensors for Dialysis – From Multiple, Manual Processes to a Faster, Automated Manufacturing Line While Maintaining Critical Tolerances and Mitigating Safety Risks
September 25, 2024
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Custom Automation
Custom automation involves the creation of tailored solutions that are designed to fit the specific needs and characteristics of your manufacturing processes. This includes considerations for the type of product, volumes, and regulatory requirements. Beyond customizing your systems, our experts work to integrate production with your existing workflows to ensure a smooth transition from manual or semi-automated processes to full, custom automation without disrupting your operations.
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Ascential - Empowering Custom Automation Solutions
Ascential believes in the power of tailored solutions. Our core strength lies in developing custom automation systems meticulously designed to align with your unique production processes. Whether you're manufacturing medical devices, pharmaceutical devices, or other life science products, our solutions are tailored to your exact needs.
Designed to help you stay ahead of the curve and adapt to market demands with ease, Ascential’s automation solutions streamline workflows, reduce downtime and costs, and enhance overall productivity. From robotics to conveyors, sensors to control systems, our solutions cover every aspect of your production and provide seamless integration for enhanced efficiency.
Our expert team has wide-ranging experience in customizing automation solutions for life sciences and medical applications. They understand the challenges manufacturers face when automating their operations and meet you where you are to design and integrate the best possible systems and workflows to increase productivity, reduce labor costs, and minimize errors.
Discrete, Multi-Part Assembly
Our experts understand that assemblies in medical manufacturing require high precision and accuracy, and individual components must fit together seamlessly to ensure the reliability and performance of the final product. Our team has deep expertise building workflows and systems for various types of assembly, including discrete multi-part processes for sensitive, high-performance products.
Ascential works with you to design automated systems, including robotics, to handle and assemble individual components with precision, speed, and consistency. Our team will also develop processes that enhance traceability and quality control of components while considering scalability to deliver the volumes you need.
Web Handling
When materials or flexible substrates are processed continuously, precise control over their movement is essential. Our automation team brings cross-functional engineering expertise to design processes and workflows that can run continuously while minimizing errors and increasing efficiency.
Our team designs web handling processes that include high-speed feeding, which is the rapid feeding of materials, components, or samples in an automated production line. These processes can be particularly useful for achieving high-throughput and increasing efficiency, but they can be challenging to build. Our experts address key challenges of high-speed feeding, working with the shape of the part and the way it is delivered to the machine for processing. They design processes that help to avoid jams and scrap waste as well as assist with debugging. Our team also supports machine maintenance, training, and process validation to plan and reduce downtime.
Ascential also works with island placement when product designs require that a separate substrate material be placed in a precise location–for example, within a zone of adhesive on a larger part. Island placement is the process of starting and stopping a web of material so that a secondary component can be placed on the primary web. This process eliminates unnecessary waste, produces high-value products, and is a good option for complex parts that may involve expensive materials.
Ascential works with you to design and deliver web handling systems and automated processing for rollers, tension control devices, guiding systems, and sensors to ensure precise and reliable material handling.
Joining
Joining processes are fundamental in the manufacturing of medical devices, diagnostic instruments, biopharmaceutical equipment, and many other products. Specific joining techniques vary based on the materials involved, desired properties of the final product, and intended application. Our experts work with you to design a highly efficient process that creates a unified structure or assembly unique to your product. From welding, bonding, sealing, and laminating, our team designs joining processes to deliver high quality parts. They navigate your project requirements to ensure all processing needs are met, including biocompatibility, sterilization, and regulatory standards.
Packaging
Packaging is critical to securely and appropriately preparing products for storage, distribution, and use. It ensures the integrity, safety, and traceability of products. But manual packaging processes are labor and time intensive, slowing down your operations and increasing cycle time.
Our team leverages the latest automation tools including machine vision and optical devices for tracing and quality control, robots for pick-and-place and palletizing, and many other labeling, conveyance, and packing systems. By designing workflows that utilize these technologies, they deliver automated packaging systems that improve efficiency and speed while reducing errors. Our experts can also utilize automation to maintain sterility requirements and reduce contamination risk during the packaging of sensitive products.
Vialing
Our team has vast experience designing manufacturing processes for vaccines, medications, and reagents that require vialing. They understand that this critical step ensures that pharmaceutical and biological products are delivered in a form that is convenient, safe, and appropriate for clinical use.
By using automated precision filling, our experts can deliver processes that ensure substance volumes or dimensions are exact in each vial while maintaining sterility and eliminating human error. Our automated processes also significantly increase the throughput of vialing processes, allowing for the rapid filling of a large number of vials within a shorter time frame.
Automated vialing systems can be seamlessly integrated with other downstream processes, such as capping, labeling, packaging, and quality control. This integrated approach streamlines the entire production workflow and minimizes the need for manual intervention.
By automating your vialing process, our experts can help drive higher throughput and accuracy, reduce human intervention, and ensure compliance with regulatory standards. This ultimately improves patient safety and product consistency while increasing profitability and scalability.
Coating
Coating can be utilized for providing protection, enhancing functionality, improving biocompatibility, or altering the surface properties of a product. Ascential works with you to design coating processes that involve a variety of materials such as polymers, metals, ceramics, or biocompatible materials. Our team helps you choose materials and coating techniques depending on the specific application and desired outcomes.
Ascential has experience developing fully- and semi-automated coating processes for a wide range of medical devices, implants, pharmaceuticals, diagnostic instruments, and other products. Our expert team works with tight tolerances and challenging specifications, designing processes to ensure quality and consistency of the application, deliver high throughput, and reduce waste. The result is improved precision, efficiency, and quality control in your production lines.
Finishing
When it comes to the final stages of production, you need the right processes and systems to prepare your products for distribution, use, or further processing. Ascential can help automate your finishing processes and integrate them into your other systems. From quality control, packaging, labeling, and other steps that contribute to product readiness, our team applies the latest technology to design precise, customized finishing processes.
Automated inspection systems can perform quality control checks on finished products, enhancing speed and accuracy in detecting defects. Our experts utilize machine vision and optics to automate inspection tasks and can apply machine learning to optimize performance or automatically adjust systems.
They also build systems that can facilitate serialization and traceability for tracking and tracing applications. Whatever your desired outcome, our team will design a process that optimizes your workflows, reduces manual handling, and integrates with your end-to-end system.
Personalization
Ascential deeply understands the intricacies of designing products for vital medical and life sciences applications. In addition to developing fully custom solutions, our experts provide a wide range of off-the-shelf, customizable products.
Our off-the-shelf products are designed to deliver the same exceptional quality and performance as fully custom products while reducing cost and time-to-market. These products can be customized by our team to meet your unique project needs.
Cutting/Slitting
Automation significantly improves the efficiency, precision, and consistency of cutting and slitting processes. Our team works with you to design automated systems that produce high-quality, uniform materials essential for the fabrication of medical devices, diagnostic components, and other products.
These systems are optimized for precision and consistency. They reduce physical demands on the operators, cutting down on fatigue and human error while improving product quality. Additionally, automated cutting systems increase throughput which allows for rapid processing of materials and increased production capacity. Our team works with you to integrate automated cutting and slitting with downstream processes, such as assembly, packaging, or further manufacturing steps. This integration streamlines the overall production workflow.
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Extrusion
Automated extrusion systems contribute to the production of high-quality, uniform materials that are integral to the fabrication of medical devices, pharmaceuticals, and other products. Ascential integrates automated extrusion processes into your production system, providing you with more control over parameters such as temperature, pressure, and extrusion speed. By automating these processes, extrusion becomes more accurate and repeatable. Additionally, automated material handling systems can be integrated with extrusion lines, facilitating the efficient transport of raw materials and the removal of finished products.
Material Transport
The movement and conveyance of raw materials, components, intermediates, and finished products within your facility significantly impacts production capacity and product quality. Automating aspects of material transport in your facility can ensure a smoother and more efficient workflow.
Ascential designs systems and workflows utilizing cutting-edge automation technologies to deliver best-in-class efficiency, reduce manual handling, and enhance traceability. From AGVs, smart containers, and robotics to barcode and RFID technology, our experts develop integrated systems that enable real-time monitoring and control and the most efficient movement of materials between production stages.
Ascential also works with you to integrate automated conveyors with other production equipment and machinery, forming a cohesive and interconnected production line. This integration streamlines the overall manufacturing process, improving efficiency and reducing the risk of bottlenecks. Automated conveyors reduce manual labor requirements, increase precision and control, and can even improve batch tracking and traceability.
Our experts work with you to build systems for sorting, conveyance, and storage that optimize these processes and integrate your operation seamlessly.
Forming
Forming refers to various processes such as molding, needle assembly, balloon blowing, and other techniques used to shape materials into specific forms or structures. These processes are the key to the production of vital medical products such as syringes, catheters, and drug delivery systems.
Automated machines can perform forming processes faster and more consistently than manual labor, and advanced sensors and feedback mechanisms in automated systems can monitor critical parameters like pressure, temperature, and forming time which minimizes defects. Beyond these efficiencies, automation can also help reduce material waste compared to manual operations.
Ascential works to design workflows that integrate sensors and software with your automated systems to enable real-time data collection and analysis of forming processes. This data can be used to continuously improve process parameters and optimize production lines, resulting in reduced downtime and enhanced productivity.