Making lean meaner

Pulp & Paper, Jan 2005 by Shaw, Monica

Mills throughout North America-such as MPI in Maine, Kruger Wayagamack in Quebec, and Ahlstrom Filtration in Illinois-are using remote diagnostics and software tools to supplement technical expertise

With competition hailing from every corner of the globe, mills are perhaps leaner in terms of personnel than they have ever been in an effort to keep profit margins acceptably high. While this "diet" might work inside a spreadsheet, it has also whittled away technical expertise from the mill floor, especially in the wake of retirements from experienced pulp and paper industry workers. What's more, this trend toward the leanest possible workforce appears here to stay, especially in North America and Europe, with their higher labor costs.

And the leanness trend is not just for mills. Supplier staffing has also fallen prey to the need for better margins and the tendency toward less capital spending in the industry, leaving less field personnel and less technical expertise for mills to draw on in the face of their own reductions.

To help mills work leaner and meaner while still maintaining their valuable assets, many supplier companies now offer a variety of services and tools, especially in the labor saving area of automation. Metso Automation's Life Cycle Management (formerly known as Future Care) offerings are an example of products, remote services, and optimization services that can leverage expertise at the mill and for the supplier.

The various Life Cycle Management tools described in Table 1 have evolved over the past five years. They offer a way for mills to maintain and optimize their assets on a long-term basis by providing tools for corrective, predictive, and preventive maintenance, as well as performance optimization. According to Jeff Long, North American director of marketing for Metso Automation's process automation systems, the extent to which a mill would need one or all of the tools in Table 1 is dependent on the individual circumstance.

"Mills are aware of the skills they've lost, and they are looking for complementary skills from us, so Mill A may buy one set of services, while Mill B will choose a whole different set," Long describes. "We can perform an audit to see which services would best support a mill, and these services provide access to our experts around the world."

The Life Cycle Management tools are used by mills all over the world and by both older and new mills, says Long. The cost for services depends how many tools are needed.

"Depending on the robustness of what tools were negotiated, the cost could be $1,000 a month or $10,000 a month, or it could be a fixed fee plus an incentive based on actual performance," Long describes. "It's all over the map, but invariably it's against a performance guarantee of some sort, either availability at the lowest level or chemical, energy, or fiber savings at the top end."

To see how these tools and services are helping mills, Pulp & Paper spoke with users at Madison Paper Industries (MPI) in Madison, Maine; Ahlstrom Filtration LLC in Taylorville, 111.; and Kruger's Wayagamack mill in Trois Rivières, Que. From remote monitoring of a distributed control system (DCS) with DNAactivity Management (AM) software to remote device diagnostics with FieldCare and vibration monitoring with the Sensodec 6S condition monitoring system, the tools are helping these mills with long-term goals.

Monitoring DCS performance at MPI

MPI in Madison, Maine, has used Metso's AM software for the past two years. This Life Cycle Management tool monitors 20,000 diagnostic sensors throughout the mill by linking to a Sensodec system and three Metso DCSs, which range in age from a newer DCS Version 7.2 on the paper machine to an older DCS Version 5.4 in the pulp mill. The areas controlled by a DCS include: (1) the No. 3 paper machine, which produces SC-A papers, (2) the three supercalenders, and (3) the groundwood pulp mill.

In the summer of 2002, Metso approached MPI about becoming a beta site for the AM product. Tim Worster, MPI's senior E&I project engineer, was not particularly worried about DCS health because the system had been upgraded in 2001, but he could anticipate the long-term benefits if the product performed as intended.

"As our system ages, corrosion issues with communications cables will occur, so the AM system could provide a quick way to pinpoint those problems and fix the cables," Worster says.

In about two days, the AM system was installed on a dedicated PC connected to MPI's DCS network. It was the first use of the software in North America and is still considered one of the largest due to the high number of diagnostic sensor points monitored. If a problem occurs, the system sends an email to the mill and to Metso (Figure 1), where a technician at one of the supplier's remote service centers is available to assist with troubleshooting.

Keeping tabs on CPU loads. One important benefit of the AM system is its ability to monitor DCS CPU loads, which can cause paper machine downtime, for example, if they reach a critical point that causes a reset of the CPU. While MPI has redundant CPUs for each of the process stations on its No. 3 paper machine to prevent such downtime, Worster values the future implications of such monitoring.