Safety first may be a tired expression, but it rings true in so many industrial settings, including pharmaceutical packaging. While corporate executives and share holders may be focused on productivity and the scientists with precision, everyone involved – regulatory agencies, the government, warehouse workers, employees at every step of the supply chain, pharmacy technicians, doctors, consumers, and more are all concerned with safety.

Cross contamination can put lives at risk. And even just a miscalculation, lapse in judgment, or inferior equipment, can put a business at risk of being heavily fined or even shut down. Companies in the highly-regulated pharmaceutical industry must always be compliant and “audit prepared.”

Pharmacies don’t operate the way they did 50 or 100 years ago, when a pharmacist used a pestle and mortar and prepared medicines as needed. Today, with so many medications available to the public and so much money in big pharma, drug products are almost exclusively mass created and manufactured far from their eventual point of purchase. After being created in a lab, most consumer drug products are bottled, boxed, stored, packaged and shipped from container closure systems.

Both before and after pills, ointments, syrups, syringes, inhalers, etc. are packaged, they are counted and weighed using bench scales that are reliably precise, durably built, intuitively operated, and loaded with safety features. When designing safety assessments for chemical and pharmaceutical packaging operations, leading companies carefully select the highest quality industrial bench scales like the OHAUS Defender.

Defender 5000 for Pharma Packaging

The Defender 5000 Series Bench Scales are designed to simplify demanding industrial applications, including production, packaging, inventory, and shipping.

Multifunctional Defender 5000 meets the weighing and measurement needs of a broad range of manufacturing processes and industrial applications, including Parts Counting with APW optimization, Checkweighing or Checkcounting, Percent Weighing, Filling, and Dynamic Weighing or Display Hold. With so many application modes, Defender eliminates the need for long and complicated manual calculations.
Durable Defender 5000 scales are built to withstand the rigors of warehouse work with a 304-grade stainless steel platform, powder-coated steel frame, and aluminum load cell that are all easy to clean and sterilize. Available washdown models are designed to withstand high pressure cleaning. Defender meets NTEP/Measurement Canada or OIML/EC type approvals (depending on region).

Additional safety features include:

• Non-slip adjustable rubber feet for stability
• 150% overload capacity
• Menu lock switch
• Stability indicator
• Overload/underload indicators

The user-friendly Defender 5000 features an alpha-numeric keypad with SoftKeys, large backlit display, and plain text on-screen prompts to guide you through operation. Defender 5000’s large transflective dot matrix display makes results easy to read, even in bright sunlight. The SmarText 3.0 interface guides you through advanced features, reducing training time for operators and simplifying setup.

Defender 5000 is designed for maximum efficiency with advanced features, including:

• Maximum configurability print output
• GMP/GLP data output with date/time for traceability
• Available Alibi memory feature for external storage
• Library/user management
• High-capacity data storage with a 50,000-item library with 1,000 user profiles
• Easy download/upload with Micro SD Card
• Multiple connectivity options for easy data transfer
• Compatibility with systems including PLCs, barcode scanners, and label printers

Available Defender 5000 floor and tabletop models feature a range of platform sizes and weighing capacities to support your needs.