sponsoredPowder Formulation And Tableting From Machine Manufacturer to Process Partner: Fette Compactings New Formula For Success

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Fette Compacting GmbH

Process excellence — Fette Compacting has been scoring points in the market for a long time. Now the market leader in tablet presses is going through a reinvention and presenting itself to the pharmaceutical, nutrition and chemical industry as a process partner for powder formulation and tableting. Why this is the way forward for the machine manufacturer?

Fette Compacting is breaking new ground and positioning itself as a process and development partner to the pharmaceutical, nutrition and chemical industries. What is the strategy behind this and how far has the machine manufacturer come?

To answer these questions, CEO Joachim Dittrich, Dr. Marten Klukkert, VP Customer Development Center and Dr. Martin Schöler, VP Technology gathered in the Nanjing Room for a discussion.

The name of the meeting room refers to the company’s largest subsidiary: Fette Compacting has been operating a production site there for 20 years. In 2018, the production capacity for tablet presses at the Chinese plant was doubled in order to supply Asian and price-sensitive markets close to customers.

In this respect, Nanjing is a symbol of the local-for-local strategy of this company from the far north of Germany, which has specialized in high-performance machines for the pharmaceutical, food and chemical industries since it was founded over 75 years ago. The pharmaceutical specialist operates 13 locations worldwide and employs more than 1,000 people.

But back to Fette’s headquarters in the town of Schwarzenbek. The trio are in an upbeat mood. The Supervisory Board has just given the green light for further investments at the sites, reports the CEO — a signal that they want to create the best conditions for further strategic development, innovation and cultural change, all of which are now in full swing.

How Do You Generate Enthusiasm?

“We defined our cultural journey for the entire company and launched it just over a year ago. It forms a central part of our philosophy,” emphasizes Dittrich. “It’s about values such as appreciation, passion, integrity, dealing with the customer, but also Zukunftsfreude — looking forward to the future. These values form our foundation and are also the driving force behind our corporate purpose ‘Together for Quality of Life'.”

In contrast to the way these things are often done elsewhere, this is not a top-down project at management level. Instead, it has been developed with all employees worldwide. Everyone, whether in India, China, the USA or Schleswig-Holstein, should “carry the same thing within them” and be able to give the same answers, emphasizes Dittrich. The enthusiasm for the new direction is palpable among all their colleagues, reports the CEO. This encourages him and his team to continue on the journey they have begun.

Keeping Pace With Market Developments

For Fette Compacting, this is about far more than just a nice slogan on the company website, which is emblazoned next to the Red Dot Award-winning tablet presses. Dittrich and his team are acting on the basis of a long-standing realization. It is no longer enough for a pharmaceutical supplier to simply develop a new machine every year and add a few features here and there. A look at the pharmaceutical market shows why this is the case. More is happening in the industry than at any time in the last few decades.

Personalized medicine, new therapy options, artificial intelligence, standardization activities in the large corporations on the one hand; greater production flexibility on the other; international competition and the merciless time pressure to be faster than the competition hovering over everything — the battle for market share for the new “take-off syringes” provides a vivid example here.

Suppliers who fail to keep pace in this tense situation will first lose contact with pharmaceutical customers, then lose market share and ultimately even the market leadership they have fought for over many years. Fette Compacting does not want to let it get that far. “We are developing into a process partner for powder formulation and tableting for our customers,” explains Dittrich. And this is reflected in many topics, such as sustainability and “the contribution that Fette Compacting can make to the health of patients.”

sponsored Fette Compacting Takes the Next Step

Technology Partner For The Pharmaceutical Industry

The focus here is on customer orientation and the offer to support process development, documentation and validation as a holistic development partner, right from the start. Especially in the case of new developments, early cooperation between the producer and machine manufacturer is important in order to get to market quickly. “We believe that by working closely with our customers, we can build a bridge between their development and production departments and thus accelerate development times and improve material availability,” says the CEO.

Closing a Gap With Expertise

Dr. Marten Klukkert and his team have identified a major challenge in the pharmaceutical world. Klukkert manages the customer centers set up around the world and is closer to customers than almost anyone else. Time and again, he experiences the gap that opens up between pharmaceutical development and the transition to production — leading to interface problems, problems of understanding and time delays.

This is where Fette Compacting wants to step into the breach and make more that seven decades of accumulated expertise available to customers. The FE CPS, which was launched 2022 at the “What’s Next? Continuous Manufacturing Circle”, is the stainless steel symbol of such cooperation.

The abbreviation CPS stands for Continuous Processing System and a new OSD concept that was developed in close cooperation with pharmaceutical companies. The aim is to lower the application hurdles for continuous production in order to convince even more pharmaceutical companies of the advantages of the technology. “We started with the ambition of establishing a continuous solution that can be used by SMEs that do not have the development resources of large companies who can dedicate an entire team to the implementation,” explains Klukkert.

Continuous Is Coming — And Now It’s For Real

Despite the industry’s well-known reluctance to embrace new technologies, more and more customers are now jumping on the “conti” bandwagon. The promises behind continuous processing, including increased flexibility, speed, efficiency, quality and sustainability, seem to be convincing. The technological expectations are being exceeded, emphasizes Klukkert, regardless of whether companies switch from granulation to direct compression or the optimization of formulations, as is the case with an OTC manufacturer that has already ordered two more FE CPS units.

The feedback has been consistently good, and as Klukkert is talking about both large pharmaceutical customers and smaller generics manufacturers, it seems to be working well with SMEs. They are “satisfied with the project situation” and that is the good news. Apparently the industry is willing to embrace something new, because the switch to continuous production is turning the entire supply chain on its head. For pharmaceutical companies, it is not just about “replacing one machine with another, but about a complete paradigm shift in production.”

Fette Compacting is pursuing this strategic path together with its customers, which is in line with the company philosophy “Together for Quality of Life” and will be an important topic at Achema. “We will be presenting the complete range of services relating to the tablet development process — the development itself, through laboratory tests to commercial production, including FE CPS,” explains Klukkert.

The Pharmaceutical Industry Reflects On Its CO₂ Footprint

Even if the term “sustainability” is sometimes overused, there’s no getting around it at the moment, not even for Fette Compacting. The company has just been awarded the Ecovadis silver medal again and considers itself to be on the right track. An environmental management system has been helping the company to achieve its own environmental and climate targets since 2022. And customers are becoming increasingly demanding; big pharma is committed to the UN’s sustainability goals.

The demand for a low CO₂ footprint is therefore increasingly impacting the supply industry. Klukkert argues that the issue should not be viewed in isolation — only in relation to the machine — but holistically. This is how the local-for-local strategy prevents emissions: “We can make local offers to customers without them having to fly around the world.” Material and – especially in the research sector — powder consumption play an important role. The less of the precious active ingredients required in the early stages of development, when production volumes are still very small, the better.

For this production-related research, Fette Compacting has established the QED (Qualified Expert Database) process database, which links formulation and process knowledge. This means that material characterization in the laboratory can be used to predict subsequent production performance, shorten development times and reduce material consumption.

Lean production processes are another key element of sustainability for Klukkert. This is precisely what the aforementioned FE CPS makes possible. While conventional wet granulation uses a fluidized bed, the handy continuous machine uses direct compression to get from the powder to the tablet without any detours, thus saving production steps that also consume a lot of energy.

Focus On Future Viability

In the development department in Schwarzenbek, Dr. Martin Schöler is fundamentally concerned about the resource-saving design of tablet presses. He is unwilling to accept the argument that Fette Compacting machines have only a minor impact on the overall energy efficiency of the production chain. In the future, he believes that the CO₂ footprint will become an increasingly important differentiating factor. “Sustainability is a core element of our development,” explains Schöler.

The focus is on energy and material-efficient production with less media consumption and emissions.

The declared aim of all current developments is to go far beyond the legal requirements. This is important in view of the fact that the machines from Schwarzenbek will be in operation for at least one, but often two generations.

Digital From The Start

For CEO Dittrich, the discussion about efficiency and sustainability is also a question of self-image and is therefore closely linked to the new strategy: “We want to drive issues forward and not be one of the driven ones.” This naturally includes the perennial issue of digitalization. Dittrich envisages a holistic approach to this, both within the company and externally in the pharmaceutical customer’s value chain. “We believe that digitalization is the driver in a fully integrated corporate environment,” he explains.

And this is where VP Technology Schöler comes into play again. His job is to translate such considerations into concrete development, machine and software concepts. “Digitalization is not an end in itself,” he says. “It’s easy to lose touch with the user when looking at things in isolation. We therefore try to think about the data application, the machine and the process together and integrate this into the development processes.” He explains what this means in very simplified terms: “It is crucial to know who needs what data and at what point in production.

Gathering Up The Treasure Trove Of Data

Some of the homework has already been done. “Thanks to our embedded Process Analytical Technology (ePAT) system, the density of data per tablet press is higher than ever before. The customer is sitting on a treasure trove of information,” adds Klukkert. The challenge now is to interlink process, machine and analytical knowledge and make it accessible for analysis at every stage of development, from the laboratory to commercial production. Schöler advocates close cooperation between operator and machine manufacturer, i.e. a technology partnership: “No user alone can really interpret this data in the same way as a team consisting of the user and the manufacturer of the machine”.

And So It Goes On

Finally, the question remains as to how Fette Compacting will tackle what will occupy the industry in the coming years. It’s clear the company’s innovation forge has an iron in the fire here too. The magic phrase is active advance development, a multi-stage process for project ideas that are not part of the traditional core business yet have plenty of potential.

The international approach is exciting, and everyone in the Fette Compacting family is invited to contribute their ideas.”This enables values such as passion and a forward-looking approach to be lived and the company’s philosophy of ‘Together for Quality of Life’ to be realized,” says Dittrich. In this way, Fette Compacting will continue to secure its market leadership in the coming decades. The trio in the Nanjing Room are quite sure of this. Visit Fette Compacting at Achema: Hall 3.0, Stand F3

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