Pharma packaging · 5 min read
How to audit a pharmaceutical packaging supplier in Pakistan
Before a pharmaceutical company hands its cartons and leaflets to a printer, it audits that printer, and it is right to. Packaging is part of the medicine's identity and its regulatory record, and a weak supplier can hold a consignment at the quality gate or, worse, put the wrong information in a patient's hands. A good audit is not a brochure tour. It is a structured look at the controls that keep a medicine pack correct, batch after batch. Here is what to inspect when you audit a packaging supplier in Pakistan.
Start with why the audit exists
Ordinary product packaging sells. Pharmaceutical packaging informs, protects and complies, and its defects carry consequences ordinary print never does. A missing batch number, an illegible expiry date, or a carton from another product mixed into your delivery can fail a whole consignment at incoming inspection or trigger a recall. The audit exists to confirm your supplier has the controls to make those failures rare and catchable.
So an audit judges systems, not samples. A printer can produce one beautiful carton for a meeting. The question is whether it can produce a hundred thousand identical, correct cartons, and prove afterwards which press, which batch and which operator made them.
Artwork and text control
Ask how a job moves from your approved artwork to plates. There should be a documented approval step: a proof checked against your master copy and signed before any plate is imaged. Ask who checks the text, how they check it, and what happens when you issue a wording revision, because an uncontrolled change process is how an old side-effects paragraph reaches the shelf.
Probe the join between carton and leaflet especially. When both come from the same supplier, a text revision updates both together and one quality pass covers them. Split across two vendors, a wording change can reach one component and miss the other. Ask to see how the supplier keeps the two in step.
Colour and the signed shade card
Colour is safety-critical in pharma, because many ranges separate dosage strengths by carton colour. Ask whether every job starts with a signed shade card: sheets pulled at the agreed colour and approved as the physical standard the run is matched against. Ask how colour is checked during the run and under what lighting, since a colour shifts visibly between daylight and warm shop light.
For a colour that must be exact every time, the answer you want to hear is a Pantone spot ink mixed to formula, not a four-colour approximation that drifts with press conditions. A supplier that treats the shade card as the first stage of every job is one that has turned colour from an opinion into a reference.
Line clearance and the mixed-carton risk
Mixed cartons are the industry's nightmare defect: a single stray carton from another product in your delivery can fail the entire batch at your incoming inspection. The control against it is line clearance, a documented check that the press, the die cutter and the pasting line are clear of the previous job before yours begins. Ask to see how clearance is recorded and who signs it off.
Follow the same logic through to dispatch. Counted and sealed cartons, batch-wise segregation in storage, and clear labelling on every bundle are what keep two products from meeting on the way out of the door. Walk the finishing and packing area and look for it in practice, not just in the quality manual.
Documentation and traceability
Ask what record survives a job. You want to be able to trace a delivered batch back to its production run: the artwork version, the signed shade card, the press, the die and the date. This is the paper trail that answers a regulator's question months later, and its absence is a red flag whatever the print quality looks like.
Systems help here. An in-house Print Management ERP and client portal, of the kind PrintVision runs, let you see where a job sits in production and keep batch records tied to each order rather than scattered across notebooks. Ask to see the actual records for a recent job, not a description of them.
Walk the floor, then decide
The most useful hour of any audit is spent on the plant floor, not in the meeting room. Ask to see the presses, the die cutting and pasting lines, the finishing area and the segregated storage. Ask to be shown a live job's paperwork against the job itself. A supplier confident in its controls will walk you through them; one that steers you back to the brochure is telling you something.
Pharmaceutical packaging has been PrintVision's forte since 1989, and the plant at 6/A Industrial Block, Allama Iqbal Town, Lahore produces cartons and leaflets for manufacturers including Searle, CCL, Remington and Schazoo. Whoever you audit, judge them on what they show you on the floor, because that is where your batches will actually be made.
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