A two-cobot machine-tending cell for a sterile pharma fill-finish line that needed to free four operators
A contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO) operating a 60,000 sq ft sterile fill-finish facility in central Florida. Two ISO 5 isolators feeding a downstream packaging line, GMP-validated, FDA-inspected annually.
Industrial Automation
Universal Robots · Robotiq · Banner · Schmalz · Allen-Bradley
The problem
The customer was facing a chronic skilled-operator shortage in a labor market where every nearby pharma site was bidding for the same people. Their downstream secondary packaging operation required four senior operators per shift to feed empty trays into a tray-erector and load filled vials into a cartoner, both at 120 trays per minute. Turnover was running 22% annually on those positions, and every backfill required 90 days to validate to GMP standards.
Their corporate sister sites had standardized on hard-guarded industrial robots, but the customer's existing footprint and mezzanine geometry made conventional robot installations impractical. They also needed a solution that could be reconfigured for new SKUs without re-running a full risk assessment.
“Adams treated our quality team as a primary stakeholder, not as a hurdle. That's why we went back to them for line two.”
What we did
We specified a two-cobot cell using two UR16e cobots — one feeding the tray-erector, one loading the cartoner — with Robotiq AirPick vacuum end-effectors and Banner safety scanners for area-presence detection. Both cobots run from a shared HMI on a Rockwell PLC, with recipe-driven SKU changeover that the line operators can trigger themselves without engineering involvement.
We worked with the customer's quality team for 12 weeks pre-install on the GMP validation package: IQ/OQ/PQ protocols, cleaning validation for the cobot end-effectors, cybersecurity hardening of the cell network, and reconfigurability documentation that holds up under FDA scrutiny. We trained both shifts on the cell and left an Adams field engineer on-site for the first two weeks of production.
The result
The cell freed three of the four secondary-packaging operators for higher-skill work elsewhere in the facility. SKU changeover dropped from a four-hour validated procedure to a 25-minute recipe load. The customer has since extended the cell to a second line and invited Adams to bid on a fill-line tending project at their corporate site in Indiana.
Components used
- UR16e cobots (qty 2) Universal Robots
- AirPick vacuum end-effectors Robotiq
- Safety laser scanners Banner
- Schmalz vacuum pump assembly Schmalz
- Allen-Bradley CompactLogix PLC integration Allen-Bradley
- GMP IQ/OQ/PQ documentation package (Adams-developed)
