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KOWA Company, Ltd. Nagoya Factory, Building H, Nagoya, Japan
Facility Considerations
 KOWA Company’s Nagoya Project features a new addition to its
manufacturing plant for oral solid dosage products. Founded in 1947, KOWA is the
pharmaceutical division of the KOWA Group of Companies with 3,000 employees. The
new addition employs state-of-the-art isolation and containment technologies and
a sophisticated automated materials handling system, and is Asia’s first
application of “Lhoest” manufacturing design principles.
Professor W J Lhoest is a pharmaceutical plant design specialist and the former
Director of European Manufacturing Services with SmithKline Beecham. His design
principles rest on the theory that rationalization has to occur in the pharmaceutical
industry. In a paper he authored in 2000 he stated that, “rationalization
means a combination of efforts in multiple directions: simplification of manufacturing
systems, a reduction of the production cycle time, a decrease in the number
of different raw materials and also the number of commercial presentations,
rationalization of packaging formats, optimization of batch sizes, a drastic
simplification of the paperwork, elimination of staging, automation of material
handling, and the clever but reasonable use of computers.”
 KOWA set
out to construct a model factory by applying these “Lhoest Concepts”
to enable them to manufacture products of high quality with flexibility and
low costs.
Processes/Manufacturing Equipment Employed
Key technologies adopted
-Segregation of operators, maintenance engineers
- Segregation of air flow for each process
- Gravity flow by Elveco type “Docking station
- Island idea in production space
- Fully automated material handling
- Two automated warehouses fully integrated with production
Results
High quality conforming to cGMP, EU-GMP and J-GMP
Complete elimination of cross contamination by segregation of:
- related personnel (operators, maintenance engineers, guests etc.)
- air flow of each process room
- Adoption of automated material handling system to reduce human error and contamination caused by operators
- Real time quality monitoring of purified water
- High containment material transportation adopting Elveco type "Docking Station" - first time in Japan
- level of containment never achieved before.
Flexible production and easy expansion of lines without disruption of the process
- Adoption of the idea of "Islands" for process units
- Segregation of air flow of each process room
- Adoption of automated material handling system
Low manufacturing cost
- Minimize "Clean Room" space
- Reduction of HVAC operating cost by saving energy
- Adoption of automated material handling system to save labor costs
Kowa Pharmaceuticals
6-29 Nikniki 3 Chome, Naka Ku
Nogoya, 460-0003
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California ePedigree Push to 2015 – What does it mean? 
