YOUR CHALLENGE:
Turning short-term gains into continuous improvement
The people, equipment and materials that comprise your mill processes are constantly changing, which means you can never settle into a “fix it and forget it” position. Or taken another way, just because you solved for a variable in your washing process today, doesn’t mean new ones won’t pop up tomorrow. And you’ll never have an overflow of people or budget to throw at unpredictable challenges.
YOUR CHALLENGE:
Turning short-term gains into continuous improvement
The people, equipment and materials that comprise your mill processes are constantly changing, which means you can never settle into a “fix it and forget it” position. Or taken another way, just because you solved for a variable in your washing process today, doesn’t mean new ones won’t pop up tomorrow. And you’ll never have an overflow of people or budget to throw at unpredictable challenges.
Which of the following factors is projected to create competitive advantage for pulp and paper companies by 2030?3
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CORRECT!
Organizations that can’t drive a step change in performance around efficiency, energy usage and sustainability will be surpassed by competitors in the next decade.
The more time that elapses between one of your operators noticing an issue and trying to solve for it, the more variables they have to rule out. If that gap is 30 minutes, they may only need to investigate a couple dozen variables; if it’s days, they’re sifting through hundreds. And if entrained air is one of the primary elements creating “noise” within your process, it can make it difficult to zero in on the source of the problem—all the while, KPMs like product quality, throughput and TCO are at risk of falling below acceptable levels.
THE SOLUTION:
Break through to new levels of washing performance
If you can’t identify root causes of issues and apply the right resources at the right time, you won’t be able to turn your short-term gains into long-term success. To move beyond incremental improvements, you need to take a scientific approach to unlock new levels of washing performance throughout your organization. Here’s how…
THE SOLUTION:
Break through to new levels of washing performance
If you can’t identify root causes of issues and apply the right resources at the right time, you won’t be able to turn your short-term gains into long-term success. To move beyond incremental improvements, you need to take a scientific approach to unlock new levels of washing performance throughout your organization. Here’s how…
Isolate entrained air noise in your process
You need continuous, accurate measurements of entrained air, so you can see it move in real time. You can then correlate spikes or dips to other continuous measurements in your process—such as drum speed, dilution, liquor temperature—for a more comprehensive view of all variables impacting washer performance.
Solve root causes of variability in and around your washing process
You need to identify trends within your entrained air data, develop hypotheses about what’s actually causing variation, and test a variety of corrective actions—repeating this “science project” approach until you’ve eliminated the root causes of issues. And once you remove air from the equation, you can better isolate and solve for other variables that had been hidden in the noise.
3. “The European pulp and paper industry in transition to a bio-economy: A Delphi study,” Anne Toppinen, Satu Pätäri, Anni Tuppura, Ari Jantunen, March, 2017.