»PROCESS« China

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

To answer these questions, CEO Joachim Dittrich, Dr.Marten Klukkert, VP Customer Development Center andDr. 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, theproduction capacity for tablet presses at the Chineseplant was doubled in order to supply Asian andprice-sensitive markets close to customers. In this respect, Nanjing is a symbol of the local-for-local strategyof this company from the far north of Germany, whichhas specialized in high-performance machines for thepharmaceutical, food and chemical industries since itwas founded over 75 years ago. The pharmaceutical specialist operates 13 locations worldwide and employsmore than 1,000 people.

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

How Do You Generate Enthusiasm?

“We defined our cultural journey for the entire companyand launched it just over a year ago. It forms a centralpart of our philosophy,” emphasizes Dittrich. “It’s aboutvalues such as appreciation, passion, integrity, dealingwith the customer, but also Zukunftsfreude—lookingforward to the future. These values form our foundationand 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 managementlevel. Instead, it has been developed with all employeesworldwide. Everyone, whether in India, China, the USAor Schleswig-Holstein, should “carry the same thingwithin them” and be able to give the same answers, emphasizes Dittrich. The enthusiasm for the new directionis palpable among all their colleagues, reports the CEO.This encourages him and his team to continue on thejourney they have begun. 

Keeping Pace With Market Developments

For Fette Compacting, this is about far more than just anice 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 along-standing realization. It is no longer enough for apharmaceutical 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 anytime in the last few decades. Personalized medicine, newtherapy options, artificial intelligence, standardizationactivities in the large corporations on the one hand;greater production flexibility on the other; internationalcompetition and the merciless time pressure to be fasterthan the competition hovering over everything—thebattle for market share for the new “take-off syringes”provides a vivid example here. Suppliers who fail to keeppace in this tense situation will first lose contact withpharmaceutical customers, then lose market share andultimately even the market leadership they have foughtfor over many years. Fette Compacting does not want tolet 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 manytopics, such as sustainability and “the contribution thatFette Compacting can make to the health of patients.”

The focus here is on customer orientation and the offerto support process development, documentation andvalidation as a holistic development partner, right fromthe start. Especially in the case of new developments,early cooperation between the producer and machinemanufacturer is important in order to get to marketquickly. “We believe that by working closely with ourcustomers, we can build a bridge between their development and production departments and thus acceleratedevelopment times and improve material availability,”says the CEO.

Closing a Gap With Expertise

Dr. Marten Klukkert and his team have identified a majorchallenge in the pharmaceutical world. Klukkert manages the customer centers set up around the world andis closer to customers than almost anyone else. Time andagain, he experiences the gap that opens up betweenpharmaceutical development and the transition to production—leading to interface problems, problems ofunderstanding and time delays. This is where Fette Compacting wants to step into the breach and make morethat seven decades of accumulated expertise availableto customers. The FE CPS, which was launched 2022 atthe “What’s Next? Continuous Manufacturing Circle”, isthe stainless steel symbol of such cooperation. The abbreviation CPS stands for Continuous Processing Systemand a new OSD concept that was developed in close cooperation with pharmaceutical companies. The aim isto lower the application hurdles for continuous production in order to convince even more pharmaceuticalcompanies of the advantages of the technology. “Westarted with the ambition of establishing a continuous solution that can be used by SMEs that do not have thedevelopment resources of large companies who candedicate an entire team to the implementation,” explains Klukkert. 

Continuous Is Coming—And Now It’s forReal

Despite the industry’s well-known reluctance to embrace new technologies, more and more customers arenow jumping on the “conti” bandwagon. The promisesbehind continuous processing, including increasedflexibility, speed, efficiency, quality and sustainability,seem to be convincing. The technological expectationsare being exceeded, emphasizes Klukkert, regardless ofwhether companies switch from granulation to directcompression or the optimization of formulations, as isthe case with an OTC manufacturer that has already ordered two more FE CPS units. The feedback has beenconsistently good, and as Klukkert is talking about bothlarge pharmaceutical customers and smaller genericsmanufacturers, it seems to be working well with SMEs.They are “satisfied with the project situation” and that isthe good news. Apparently the industry is willing toembrace something new, because the switch to continuous production is turning the entire supply chain onits head. For pharmaceutical companies, it is not justabout “replacing one machine with another, but abouta complete paradigm shift in production.” Fette Compacting is pursuing this strategic path together with itscustomers, 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 ItsCO2 Footprint

Even if the term “sustainability” is sometimes overused,there’s no getting around it at the moment, not even forFette Compacting. The company has just been awardedthe Ecovadis silver medal again and considers itself tobe on the right track. An environmental managementsystem has been helping the company to achieve its ownenvironmental and climate targets since 2022. And customers are becoming increasingly demanding; big pharma is committed to the UN’s sustainability goals. Thedemand for a low CO2 footprint is therefore increasingly impacting the supply industry. Klukkert argues thatthe issue should not be viewed in isolation—only inrelation to the machine—but holistically. This is howthe local-for-local strategy prevents emissions: “We canmake local offers to customers without them having tofly around the world.” Material and – especially in theresearch 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 thisproduction-related research, Fette Compacting has established the QED (Qualified Expert Database) processdatabase, which links formulation and process knowledge. This means that material characterization in thelaboratory can be used to predict subsequent production performance, shorten development times and reduce material consumption. Lean production processesare another key element of sustainability for Klukkert.This is precisely what the aforementioned FE CPS makespossible. While conventional wet granulation uses afluidized bed, the handy continuous machine uses direct compression to get from the powder to the tabletwithout any detours, thus saving production steps thatalso consume a lot of energy. 

Focus on Future Viability

In the development department in Schwarzenbek, Dr.Martin Schöler is fundamentally concerned about theresource-saving design of tablet presses. He is unwillingto accept the argument that Fette Compacting machineshave only a minor impact on the overall energy efficiency of the production chain. In the future, he believes thatthe CO2 footprint will become an increasingly importantdifferentiating factor. “Sustainability is a core element of our development,” explains Schöler. The focus is onenergy and material-efficient production with less media consumption and emissions. The declared aim of allcurrent developments is to go far beyond the legal requirements. This is important in view of the fact that themachines from Schwarzenbek will be in operation for atleast one, but often two generations.

“The issue of sustainability is firmlyanchored in our development work.”Dr. Martin Schöler, VP Technology

Digital From the Start

For CEO Dittrich, the discussion about efficiency andsustainability is also a question of self-image and istherefore closely linked to the new strategy: “We wantto drive issues forward and not be one of the drivenones.” 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 corporateenvironment,” he explains.

And this is where VP Technology Schöler comes intoplay again. His job is to translate such considerationsinto concrete development, machine and software concepts. “Digitalization is not an end in itself,” he says. “It’seasy to lose touch with the user when looking at thingsin isolation. We therefore try to think about the dataapplication, the machine and the process together andintegrate this into the development processes.” He explains what this means in very simplified terms: “It iscrucial to know who needs what data and at what pointin production.

Gathering Up the Treasure Trove of Data

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

Finally, the question remains as to how Fette Compacting will tackle what will occupy the industry in thecoming years. It’s clear the company’s innovation forgehas an iron in the fire here too. The magic phrase is active advance development, a multi-stage process forproject ideas that are not part of the traditional corebusiness yet have plenty of potential. The internationalapproach is exciting, and everyone in the Fette Compacting family is invited to contribute their ideas.”Thisenables values such as passion and a forward-lookingapproach 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 itsmarket leadership in the coming decades. The trio inthe Nanjing Room are quite sure of this. (agk)