The Press Is One Machine in a Line: What Tablet Production Actually Involves

People ring us about a tablet press. What they usually need is a solid dose line, and the press is one machine inside it.

This gap causes more stalled projects in Nigeria than any technical problem does. A buyer budgets carefully for the press, ships it, installs it, and then discovers the powder won’t flow, there’s nothing to blend it in, no way to dry it, no way to blister it and no lab to test it. The press sits under a tarpaulin while the rest of the money is found.

Here’s the whole chain, in the order material moves through it.

Dispensing and sieving

Raw materials get weighed out under controlled conditions. You need a dispensing booth with laminar airflow, calibrated balances across several weight ranges, and a sieve or mill to break up lumps.

This room is where NAFDAC inspectors often start, because dispensing records are the beginning of your batch traceability. Cheap balances that drift are a false economy here.

Granulation, and the choice that shapes everything else

Raw powder rarely compresses well. It doesn’t flow evenly into the die, so tablet weight wanders. Granulation fixes that by turning fine powder into free-flowing granules.

Three routes exist, and the one you pick determines a large chunk of your equipment list.

Wet granulation is the traditional route. Powder plus a binder solution in a rapid mixer granulator, then drying in a fluid bed dryer or tray oven, then sizing through a mill. It works with almost anything. It also means you’re buying an RMG, a dryer and a mill, and adding a drying step that eats hours per batch. Heat-sensitive actives don’t always survive it.

Dry granulation uses a roller compactor to squeeze powder into ribbon, then mills the ribbon into granules. No water, no heat, no drying step. Good for moisture-sensitive products. The compactor is a serious piece of equipment though, and yield losses on fines are real.

Direct compression skips granulation entirely. You blend the active with directly compressible excipients and go straight to the press. Fewest machines, shortest process, lowest headcount. But it only works if your active is well behaved and your dose is modest, and the special excipients cost more per kilo. Plenty of Nigerian products can run this way and plenty can’t.

Decide this before you buy anything. A plant built for wet granulation and a plant built for direct compression look nothing alike.

Blending

Granules get blended with the remaining excipients, and lubricant goes in last. A double cone blender, V blender or octagonal blender does this.

Blending is where content uniformity is won or lost, and over-blending after the lubricant goes in will soften your tablets. Two extra minutes on a magnesium stearate blend can drop hardness noticeably. Operators need to be told this, in writing, because it’s counter-intuitive.

Compression

The press. Covered separately in this series. It’s usually the single most expensive machine in the line, and often less than a fifth of the total equipment spend.

Coating

Not every tablet needs coating. Many do, for taste masking, moisture protection, appearance, or delayed release.

A perforated coating pan with a spray system, hot air supply and exhaust handling is the standard answer. Budget for the air handling, not just the pan. And be honest about whether you need it, because coating adds a process step, a validation burden and a whole extra set of things that can go wrong.

Packing

Blister packing machines form the PVC pocket, drop the tablet in, seal the foil and cut the strip. Alu-alu machines do the same with foil on both sides, for moisture-sensitive products.

Match the blister machine’s speed to the press, not to the brochure. A press making 60,000 tablets an hour and a blister machine handling 20,000 means the press runs a third of the time and you’ve paid for capacity you can’t use. This mismatch is extremely common.

After that, cartoning, leaflet insertion, batch coding and shrink wrapping. Small plants do some of this by hand. That’s acceptable, and it’s cheaper, but it needs to be in the layout NAFDAC approves.

The lab, which isn’t optional

You need a quality control laboratory. Disintegration tester, dissolution apparatus, hardness tester, friability tester, analytical balance, and either HPLC or a documented arrangement with a contract lab.

This surprises people. It shouldn’t. GMP means you test what you make and keep the records, and NAFDAC inspects the lab as closely as the production floor. Budget for it at the start, along with a stability chamber, because stability data is part of product registration.

What holds it all together

Purified water, usually reverse osmosis with distribution. HVAC with filtration, pressure differentials between rooms, and humidity control that actually works in Nigerian conditions. Dust extraction. Compressed air, oil free where it touches product. Change rooms and airlocks.

The utilities frequently cost more than the production machines. They’re also the part buyers cut when the budget tightens, and they’re the part that fails a GMP inspection.

The practical point

Cost the whole line before you commit to any single machine. Then match the capacities across it, so no machine is waiting on another.

And build the layout with NAFDAC’s facility layout review in mind from the first drawing. As of June 2026 the agency had reviewed and approved layouts for 176 pharmaceutical companies, 106 of them new entrants. Getting the layout approved before you pour concrete is far cheaper than moving a wall afterwards.