20 years of ensuring cleanrooms are safe

For about 30 years, Egon Buchta has been working in the cleanroom industry. In 1994, he became self-employed as a service provider for the maintenance and qualification of cleanrooms, and since 2004, he has been running his company as a GmbH based in Wannweil, Baden-Württemberg. In the year of the company's 20th anniversary, he now opened an external branch of his "Engineering Office & Cleanroom Service Egon Buchta GmbH" in Dresden. "We now also offer hygiene and GMP consulting there," explains the shareholder and managing director.

With the move to Dresden, Buchta responded to the increasingly strong demand in the states of Saxony and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. "We are now even closer to our customers and can support them even faster." With the establishment of the external branch, he increased the number of full-time employees from 10 to 12, and further expansion is already planned.

When the now 58-year-old diploma engineer (FH) began his entrepreneurial career a little over 20 years ago in his home in Reutlingen, he was the only provider in Germany offering an independent service for cleanrooms. Even then, Buchta consciously decided against trading in equipment and accessories: "Independence has always been my strength! I always want to recommend the product that best fits the customer's needs — not the one I currently have in my range."

If you ask Egon Buchta what has changed in the industry over the past 20 years, two things come to mind immediately: "The measuring devices we work with are getting smaller, and the paper we print on is increasing." No wonder, then, that the abbreviation GMP is often translated as "give more paper" instead of "Good Manufacturing Practice."

But all jokes aside. Egon Buchta does not want to go back to the days when cleanroom inspections were hardly documented. "From the beginning, I provided my clients with comprehensive test reports so they could understand what I had examined." After all, much depends on ensuring that the cleanrooms where, for example, highly effective medicines are produced are truly sterile. "This applies not only to the patients receiving the medicine but also to the staff manufacturing it."

Looking into Buchta's business premises, you usually see only a few employees at their desks. "Our workplace is with the customer," says the boss. These customers are as diverse as the entire industry: "Our most important mainstay is service and maintenance work. We carry this out for small pharmacies that occasionally produce cytostatics, as well as for large companies like Boehringer Ingelheim in Biberach, Sanofi, Qiagen, or Baxter, to name just a few." It is very important to Egon Buchta to respond flexibly to his customers' needs. "If there's an emergency, we come as quickly as possible." From this approach, the decision also arose to open an external branch in Dresden, more than 500 kilometers from Wannweil, and to expand the range of services through hygiene and GMP consulting.

Because quality is at the top of Egon Buchta's value scale, he has been involved since 1985 in the working group for cytostatics cabinets in the standards committee for laboratory equipment and laboratory facilities in DIN. Since 2000, he has served as chairman there. Additionally, he is committed to the qualification of cleanroom service technicians. "Our industry is too small to create its own training profession," says the company boss, "so further training courses like those offered by the IHK Middle Lower Rhine in Neuss and TÜV Nord are all the more important." Buchta has been a speaker at the IHK for many years. He himself traveled to England for his first additional qualification in 1994. At King’s College of the University of London, he earned a diploma in "Testing Containment Systems."

No wonder he reacts irritably when he encounters gross negligence or obvious errors. For example, Buchta recently discovered during a cleanroom maintenance that another service company had installed filters whose fittings did not match — leading to an increased contamination risk. Shortly afterward, he was shocked by the next case: an unknown "colleague" had copied Buchta's template for measurement reports and didn't even change the company name. The data entered into the report, according to Buchta, was mostly misleading. The service provider from Wannweil now wants to have the matter legally examined. Ultimately, such incidents motivate him to continue providing his customers with optimal support with his team in the future.