As a professional in the pharmaceutical market, you may need to select and source Aluminum Seal crimp caps to effectively seal vials and protect your formula (vaccine, serum, vitamins) from external aggression (germs, oxygen, pollution). Aluminum seal caps are a crucial part of a vial system. The selection of an appropriate seal supplier is critical.
In this article you will find major guidelines to ease, secure and strengthen your supplier selection process.
Most of the time, the vial sealing solution contains a rubber stopper (butyle or silicone) and an aluminum-based crimp cap to ensure the integrity of the vial. This aluminum overseal may include as well an assembled plastic lid, which protects the injection site of the rubber stopper and which will be removed by the nurse or physician who administers the drug. The different colors of the plastic lid ensure drug-recognition on the shelf and reduce administration errors. The aluminum material comes as a coil in the relevant color shade while the rubber plug and the plastic cap are delivered in boxes also in the agreed color.
The foil, the rubber plug and the plastic cap goes through the incoming quality test control before getting the green light to move to further manufacturing steps.
The aluminum coil is then unwound under the press, cutted and embossed and formed according to the customer's specifications. In process quality control are operated to make sure the production is in specification and can go to the assembly process. In some cases other manufacturing steps may come into play such as lubrication, cutting, embossment, cleaning, sterilising.
In some cases the flip off plastic cap is the third component which comes into play.
The metal shell and the two or three parts are assembled together under a strict index or continuous motion assembly process. Optimal online checks are made including 100% visual control of the assembled products, in terms of functional, dimensional, cosmetic and aesthetic compliance.
In some cases, the cap supplier is asked to secure the packing and shipping under a sterilized environment. In this case, the caps are packed in a sealed bag filled in a clean room or at least in a controlled air flow.
The aluminum seal cap market for the pharmaceutical industry is estimated at least at 15 Billion of caps supplied by less than 2 hands full of manufacturers around the globe. Within this small group, only few qualify for the highest market standards required to supply the major global pharmaceutical firms.
Therefore, if you are seeking for the best packaging to protect your product, secure your sourcing, ease your filling for an overall benefit of your brand image and profitability, you need to select from these premium quality players.
You most probably already follow an internal selection protocol. Nevertheless, here are some guidelines you may consider in order to check that your selection process is properly matching and overlapping our recommendations. Here are some questions you and the other stakeholders may want to answer upfront :
Sourcing an exact “me too” aluminum seal cap is usually required as your products are filled and must follow a strict protocol (such as FAD). Therefore, these are the technical aspects you shall consider to validate the exact similarity :
Manufacturing quality standards are probably the first aspects you may want to address. Within the premium short list of suppliers, the highest quality standards are a must and should be a given for their clients.
Unfortunately, recent sanitary and geopolitical history has proven that duplicating packaging components sourcing capabilities is worth considering to secure your market supply, your customer and your shareholders revenues. We know how complex it is to change a supplier portfolio within the pharmaceutical industry specially for drugs subject to prescription. We do recommend you challenge your next potential aluminum seal cap supplier to make sure you don’t miss a profitable opportunity.