Contact point: Lens manufacturing at the heart of Europe

Manufacturing contact lenses is a volume business and the scale of the operation at CooperVision’s daily disposable manufacturing facility in Gyal, near Budapest’s airport, is impressive. Shail Patel, professional services consultant with CooperVision, explains the centre’s position, in the centre of Europe, makes sense for distribution as does its location close to the airport. The centre has won a prestigious Hungarian architecture award and was conceived and built by Sauflon shortly before its acquisition by CooperVision. Sauflon chose the location for the reasons above and the availability of a skilled and flexible workforce.

Since the impressive, shiny, white facility was set up (Optician 09.12.13) volume at the plant has grown, as has its footprint. Patel says the site now occupies 18,000sqm employing 1,200 people producing 1.7 million contact lenses a day, every day through three eight-hour shifts. The store room contains a buffer of 110 million lenses which would provide two months’ worth of stock. Production currently employs 24 production lines in 12 cells, each cell is housed behind its own firewall and expansion, running at 35% a year, is through the addition of modular replicated manufacturing cells. The scale and modernity of the plant could not be more different from the humble contact lens its produces. ‘When people see contact lenses being manufactured for the first time it changes their attitude,’ says Patel.