Multivariate statistical process control approach to monitor quality of chloroquine phosphate tablet (bp250mg) in Dana pharmaceutical company

Recently, much attention has been raised on effects of high increase in drugs counterfeiting and sub-standard quality which leads to many casualties in Nigeria. The Multivariate Statistical Process Control Charts approach was employed to examine such defects especially in assessing the official physico-chemical quality of chloroquine phosphate tablet (BP250mg) which claimed to contain the required quality properties. The Multivariate Exponentially Weighted Moving Average (MEWMA) Control Chart gives a powerful and reliable control chart than the widely used Hotelling’s T2˗Control Chart, which detects the smallest shift in the product process means and have minimum process variability. Also, the Matrix of scatter plots indicated the existence of relationship among the process variables and the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) minimized the rate of dimensionality of the process variability, which captured most of the variables outliers and retained the first Principal Components (PC) that explained over 99% variability of the product. To this end, the study results shows that the product quality characteristics (process variables) is under control (stable) and conform to international standard as specified by BP 2002.