Following a successful Exhibition in December 2018, the powder handling specialists from Matcon returned to India CPhI and P-MEC India 2019.
P-MEC 2019 is the ‘seedbed of the growing Indian Pharma Industry’ providing the Matcon team with the perfect opportunity to showcase new products, solve powder handling challenges and renew existing project conversations with industry leading professionals. At this year’s event the team were pleased to be joined on the Booth by colleagues from fellow Material Processing Technologies, Quadro Engineering, Microfluidics and Fitzpatrick.
To provide a review of PMEC 2019, we spoke to the Matcon team to learn more about the event and get the latest news in Pharmaceutical Manufacturing from Delhi, India.
With a strong local focus in the India market, what was the aim of the team at PMEC this year?
P-MEC provides Matcon with great opportunity to showcase our market leading equipment. This year, we maintained the focus on powder & tablet handling along with key exhibits that include our discharge station, however, we wanted to change the message slightly this year. Instead of simply focusing on the products we wanted to look at the common problems we regularly help customers tackle. After all, our aim for being at the event is to speak to people and help them solve problems and in turn improve efficiencies.
What were the main role functions of the people attending PMEC 2019?
As ever with such a large show we saw a diverse range of people on the stand, Owners & CEOs, VPs and General Management were all represented, functional responsibility of these people was across Procurement, Quality Control Engineering, Operations, R&D as well as Production.
What were the common industry trends and topics being discussed at PMEC 2019?
As we were trying to target our message on the Cone Valve benefits in terms of overcoming common problems most of the conversations were around the results of implementing IBCs – increased compression machine speed, higher throughput, increased coating capacity. All of these are centered on the Cone Valve's ability to consistently and reliably move powder in to compression machine hoppers.
On the tablet side the concept of 1 coating batch per IBC or perhaps no more than 2 or 3 was received well, several other exhibitors were focused on improving manual handling of tablets in drums, this misses the point and merely sticks a band-aid over the problem, Matcon’s solution drastically reduces the need for multiple movements.
Did your stand visitors have any common challenges? How do Matcon solve these?
Referring to the points above, one common challenge beyond the powder characteristics seems to be around labour and production capacity.
As an annual exhibitor at PMEC how did 2019 compare to previous years?
This was the 2nd year in Delhi so a comparison can be drawn to last year, for me there was a real buzz about the place this year, whether this is due to Delhi now being “home” for PMEC or whether this reflects a renewed optimism in the Industry is yet to be seen. Maybe this is a good sign of India Pharma Industry reviving after a sluggish last 2 years.
