Automation for Reliable Pharmaceutical Tablet Testing

May 14, 2025

 

A major challenge for the pharmaceutical industry, is ensuring the quality and consistency. To alleviate this concern, pharma companies constantly look to improve their workflow safety, consistentcy and ultimately meeting stringent regulations; this prevents expensive product-recalls and ensures brand integrity. Considerations including tablet thickness, hardness, weight, size, and shape need to be taken into account to ensure the correct dosage, prevent problems in the manufacturing process, and make the tablet itself easy to swallow. 

Whether you're testing solid tablets or capsules, ensuring there is no variability from one batch to another is critical.  Here’s why:

• Weight: Measuring for the weight of each tablet ensures that there is a consistent dosage.  Inconsistent weights may result in an over or under dosage causing ineffective treatment
• Thickness: The thickness of each pharmaceutical is important when considering the pill or capsules dissolution and its effectiveness.  The thickness measurement also helps in ensuring consistency.
• Width & Length: This comes down to the experience of swallowing this medication.  Too large and the tablet itself could present itself as a choking-hazard or prevent the user from swallowing the tablet at all.
• Hardness: The hardness of each tablet is essential to ensure the proper time-release of the pharmaceutical and prevents breaking or chipping.  The hardness is also useful for making sure the tablet is in a useable state when received by the user.

Labs who employ manual testing methods in their workflow find the process extremely time consuming and struggle to ensure both accuracy and consistency. As this is realized and the struggle becomes more evident, pharmaceutical labs are turning to automated solutions for their tablet testing.  Automation streamlines your workflow from R&D to final production and ensures a reliable and consistent pharmaceutical tablet without compromising quality.

In keeping with the integration of an automated system in your lab, consider the time saving measures.  A fully automated tablet tester is capable of providing test results in a fraction of the time, increasing your throughput capabilities and allowing you to perform other laboratory tasks while the unit processes your samples.

The ERWEKA EasyCheck is a low-profile unit for fully automatic and high-precision testing of your tablets for precise weight, thickness, size and hardness with limited human intervention.  Improving your workflow even further, the EasyCheck saves up to 1 million results directly on the unit so that you will never have to worry about missing data and will have an audit trail for future reference.

If challenges of ensuring product quality and consistency are slowing your workflow, now is the time to consider automation as a solution to your pharmaceutical testing requirements. 

Curious about automating your lab’s workflow and improving efficiency? 
Click here to read more and learn how 

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