Abstract
Maintaining a state of compliance with Current Good Manufacturing Practices (CGMP) remains a challenge for manufacturing automated processes within pharmaceuticals industries. The challenge lies in dealing with integrated control systems and easy, user friendly and reliable monitoring approach that reduces the problem of manufacturing faults, which is costly to the organization. Mechatronic automated design is the integrated design of a mechanical system and its embedded control system. This paper presents the project management side for this mechatronic automated system of upgrading a tablet coating machine in a pharmaceutical plant, in order to achieve a powerful control processing system, process monitoring and reporting while concerning in increasing process productivity and quality. The approach used in the mechatronic automated system, to upgrade the tablets coating machine, based on investing in the power of two, relatively novel, technologies; Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC) and Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA). The integration of both technologies provided a real powerful upgraded design that increases the efficiency, reliability and robustness of the control and monitoring process, and reduces time, cost and rework. The project management of a machine in-service is quite challenging since coordination with the different departments and scheduling production plans should be accommodated with a tight retrofitting plans.