Facilitated vaccine transport through vacuum technology

The first vac­cines against COVID-19 have been avail­able in Ger­many since the end of last year. Since then, Schmalz has received a notice­able increase in inquiries from the phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal indus­try. This is because the vac­u­um expert offers suit­able com­po­nents for this indus­try that safe­ly han­dle med­ical prod­ucts in both auto­mat­ed and man­u­al pro­duc­tion process­es — for exam­ple, in the logis­tics cen­ter of a vac­cine manufacturer.

“For blis­ters, ampoules, syringes or injec­tion vials, we offer suc­tion pads with small diam­e­ters. Our grip­pers can, for exam­ple, grip small glass jars con­tain­ing vac­cine extreme­ly gen­tly and with­out con­t­a­m­i­na­tion. In the logis­tics cen­ter, one employ­ee often moves a large num­ber of these pack­ages man­u­al­ly and at high cycle rates. Over the course of the day, he thus car­ries loads of sev­er­al 100 kilograms.”
— Dr. Maik Fiedler, head of the Vac­u­um Automa­tion and Han­dling busi­ness units.

This puts an enor­mous strain on his health, espe­cial­ly on his back. With the vac­u­um tube lifter, on the oth­er hand, he can eas­i­ly pick up and move these heavy box­es of vac­cine dos­es with one hand.

Supporters in the pandemic

“Our vac­u­um grip­ping solu­tions are often in con­tin­u­ous use in the pan­dem­ic at all,” says Fiedler. Typ­i­cal appli­ca­tions, he says, include han­dling food in dis­tri­b­u­tion cen­ters, grip­ping med­ical prod­ucts or pack­ages of pro­tec­tive cloth­ing for hos­pi­tal staff. “Our prod­ucts ensure that sup­ply chains func­tion reli­ably in indus­tries that are often described as sys­tem-rel­e­vant,” empha­sizes the han­dling expert. In India, the USA or even in Ger­many, the sites have there­fore also been clas­si­fied as par­tic­u­lar­ly impor­tant for the community.
Due to Coro­na, Schmalz is cur­rent­ly receiv­ing an increas­ing num­ber of inquiries from logis­tics ser­vice providers, from robot­ics and from the gen­er­al automa­tion indus­try. In order to also reach its cus­tomers on the increas­ing­ly used dig­i­tal chan­nels, the vac­u­um expert has revised its Inter­net pres­ence with inte­grat­ed store. More than 60,000 indi­vid­ual pages pro­vide space not only for in-depth vac­u­um exper­tise and all prod­ucts, but also for mod­ern dig­i­tal ser­vices relat­ed to the prod­uct life cycle: CAD mod­els and con­fig­u­ra­tors, help­ful soft­ware mod­ules and apps for para­me­ter­i­za­tion and oper­a­tion in both vac­u­um automa­tion and man­u­al handling.