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ABOUT USSSY Group Limited is a large high-tech pharmaceutical enterprise with coordinated development of R&D and industrialization in multiple fields such as new drugs, generic drugs, characteristic APIs
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INNOVATIONSSY Group Limited has built a relatively perfect scientific research and innovation system with the development mode of “production, learning, research, and application” of multi-disciplinary integration and multi-directional combination.
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RECRUITIt has established high-level innovation platforms such as engineering laboratory and technology research center jointly with Chinese Academy of Sciences, and now has nearly 400 high-level talents in drug research, analysis and clinical research.
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SUBSIDIARIESThe company has a diversified business development pattern of R&D, production and export of new drugs, generic drugs, characteristic APIs, advanced finished pharmaceutical products, biological preparations and pharmaceutical packaging materials.
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CONTACTWe will continue to strengthen innovation-driven development, will vigorously encourage the integration of production and research, strengthen and improve the five domains: new drugs, biological drugs, traditional Chinese medicine, generic drugs and APIs
Developing New-Form Productive Forces Tailored to Local Conditions | Shijiazhuang Sihua Pharmaceutical: Digital Workshops “Smart-Manufacture” Star Products
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发布时间：2024-07-15
【概要描述】
On the morning of June 30, the digital and intelligent upright soft-pack infusion production workshop at Shijiazhuang Sihua Pharmaceutical Group (hereinafter referred to as “Shijiazhuang Sihua”) was bustling with activity. Medicinal solutions flowed silently through silver-white pipelines, industrial robots deftly swung their arms, and fully packaged large-volume infusion products were automatically conveyed along helical conveyor belts to the warehouse—painting a vivid picture of vibrant smart manufacturing.
On the morning of June 30, the digital and intelligent upright soft-pack infusion production workshop at Shijiazhuang Sihua Pharmaceutical Group (hereinafter referred to as “Shijiazhuang Sihua”) was bustling with activity: medicinal solutions flowed silently through silver-white pipelines, industrial robots deftly pivoted their arms, and fully packaged large-volume infusion products were automatically conveyed along helical conveyor belts to the warehouse—painting a vivid picture of thriving smart manufacturing.
“The most distinctive feature of this workshop is its high degree of automation and digitalization—employees are required only to monitor process parameters, while all other steps, including solution preparation, bottle manufacturing, filling, sterilization, visual inspection, and boxing, are fully handled by equipment,” said Wei Peng, Deputy General Manager of the Second Manufacturing Center at Shijiazhuang Sihua Pharmaceutical. He added that the new workshop, which was commissioned last December, is equipped with the industry’s most advanced digital technologies, enabling it to produce 2 million bottles (or bags) of large-volume parenterals per day—a production capacity that ranks among the highest in the world.
Large-volume parenteral solutions refer to sterile liquid preparations with a volume of 50 mL or more that are administered directly by intravenous infusion and are widely used in clinical practice.
Shijiazhuang Sihua Pharmaceutical is a leading enterprise in China’s large-volume parenteral solutions sector, with numerous product specifications consistently serving as star offerings in the market. In recent years, the company has steadfastly pursued digital transformation; in 2022, its “Digital R&D and Design of Products” was recognized as an outstanding smart manufacturing scenario by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and this year, its “Innovative Application of an Intelligent Operations and Collaborative Dispatch Platform for Pharmaceuticals” has again been selected as a pioneering application case on the MIIT’s Industrial Internet Platform. Digital empowerment and the integration of digital and intelligent technologies have become Shijiazhuang Sihua Pharmaceutical’s key strategy for developing new-quality productivity tailored to local conditions.
On the afternoon of the 30th, Wei Peng had a quick meal in the canteen and then hurried to the workshop, where he changed into cleanroom attire and entered the cleanroom area.
“They’re all new equipment, and we’re still in the ramp-up phase for production capacity, so I need to keep a close eye on things.” What Wei Peng is most concerned about are the bottle-making and filling/sealing process, as well as the lamp inspection stage.
“Xiaokang, how’s the stability of bottle production?” Wei Peng asked Kang Ru, an employee at the bottle-making and filling station, as he walked up to the blue bottling machine.
“Excellent—it’s now stabilized at 100%,” Kang Ru replied, her eyes fixed on the equipment’s parameter panel.
With a soft swishing sound, the semi-transparent bottles “blown” by the bottle-making machine are grasped by an industrial robot, inverted and placed onto a conveyor belt. The bottles are then swiftly conveyed to the filling and sealing station, where they are filled with medication and capped at a rate of 300 bottles per minute, before being transported via an automated conveyor to the loading area.
Seeing that the bottle-making and filling/sealing equipment was operating normally, Wei heaved a sigh of relief. “The new equipment is highly efficient and has solved our biggest pain point,” Wei said. Before the new workshop was completed, bottle-making was the bottleneck hindering production capacity.
At that time, bottle-making and filling were handled by two separate sets of equipment: bottle-making was slow, while filling was fast. Every time a production schedule was drawn up, it had to “take the bottle-maker’s lead,” with output determined by the bottle-maker’s capacity.
In the new workshop, a more efficient one-step bottle-making machine has been implemented, and the bottle-making and filling machines have been integrated into a continuous production line, with synchronized capacity and operating frequency, thereby completely resolving the previous pain points.
Next, Wei Peng arrived at the lamp inspection area. There, more than a dozen conveyor belts were neatly lined up in succession, each leading to a square box taller than a person. Large infusion bottles (or bags) stood like soldiers awaiting inspection, moving in orderly rows through the inspection station.
“This is a fully automated visual inspection machine, responsible for examining product appearance and detecting foreign objects in the liquid. It can inspect 300 bottles per minute—50 times faster than manual inspection,” Wei Peng said, then walked to the opposite side of the rectangular unit and watched as non-conforming large-volume infusion bottles (or bags) were removed from the conveyor belt and routed to the manual re-inspection process.
“This device is equipped with AI capabilities and learns autonomously from vast amounts of data; the larger the training dataset, the higher the defect detection rate,” Wei Peng said as he operated the keyboard and pointed to a photo on the screen that appeared to show a quality issue with a bottle. “This is a case where the device’s initial judgment was inaccurate. Once an operator confirms the finding manually, the device will be able to automatically identify the same defect in the future.”
“Thanks to more than six months of extensive ‘data training,’ the equipment’s defect detection rate has steadily improved, fully meeting our stringent quality requirements,” Wei Peng said, expressing great satisfaction with the performance of the fully automated lamp inspection machine.
The application of digital technologies such as information interconnection, data-driven decision-making, and intelligent evolution has enabled Shijiazhuang Sihua Pharmaceutical to achieve efficient collaboration and intelligent responsiveness across all aspects of production management.
By gaining the initiative in the development of new tracks and emerging fields, Shijiazhuang Sihua Pharmaceutical has opened up a much broader market. Today, its soft-bag infusion products account for half of the domestic market, further solidifying its market position.
On June 25, the 2024 China Pharmaceutical and Health Industry Symbiosis Conference opened in Huzhou, Zhejiang Province. Shijiazhuang Sihua Pharmaceutical was once again recognized on the conference’s 2023 Top 100 List of Chinese Chemical Pharmaceutical Enterprises, ranking 34th—five places higher than the previous year.
“In our technological upgrading and project development, we are aiming to build a lighthouse factory, aligning with Industry 4.0 and the China Intelligent Manufacturing 2025 standards. With a global perspective, we are implementing digital solutions across the entire production process—particularly in quality management, procurement, warehousing, logistics, and line integration—and constructing smart factories to the highest standards, thereby continuously accelerating the pace of new industrialization,” said Wu Hengyao, President of Shijiazhuang Sihua Pharmaceutical.
Embarking on digital transformation and forging ahead into the new. On May 31, the Leading Group for Building Hebei Province into a Manufacturing Powerhouse issued the “Action Plan for Accelerating Technological Transformation and Upgrading of the Manufacturing Sector in Hebei Province,” which calls for speeding up technological upgrades in ten key industries, including biopharmaceuticals, and for elevating the level of digitalization in core equipment and critical processes. Biopharmaceutical companies in Hebei have already taken action, using the cultivation and development of new-quality productive forces as a key lever to create new momentum for the robust growth of the province’s biopharmaceutical industry.
Originally published on the Great Wall Network·Hebei Cloud Client.
(Hebei Economic Daily reporters Yuan Lipeng and Gong Xingmin, intern Sang Haize)
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