Paper Technology International 2020 - Journal - Page 15

PAPERTECHNOLOGYINTERNATIONAL
Figure 3: TietoEVRY’s TIPS Industry Solutions and Services
is optimized for the pulp, paper, board, packaging, tissue, and
non-woven customers utilizing industry-proven best practices.
It is the leading industry-specific ERP (Enterprise Resource
Planning) and MES (Manufacturing Execution System) and has
already been installed in more than 300 locations worldwide.
Increasing ambitions and united efforts to combat climate
change have led to major steps in every company to implement a
sustainability agenda for the benefit of planet, people, and profits.
This, together with the recent pandemic challenges in both supply
chains and workforce issues, has also resulted in increasing the
speed at which positive, new, environmentally friendly, and more
efficient solutions are created. The increasing capabilities of the
industry are now even more fuelled by legislation and new emerging
KPIs, such as carbon costs, emissions, and energy efficiency.
The speed of change is constantly increasing. Consumer
behaviour is influencing many aspects of the industry. Good
examples are the skyrocketing tissue and containerboard demand,
anti-plastic sentiment, fresh fibre demand, recycled paper quality
and availability, machine rebuilds, increased energy and shipping
costs, home vs local vs global market changes and consolidation,
new technologies, volume of data.
The challenge to manage it all requires new capabilities to
support businesses and the industry. Beyond the profound need of
having efficiency, profitability and customer services in place, there
is a need to manage end-to-end processes, solutions, and people
in the fully integrated digital value chain. This is required all the way
from raw materials and supplier sources to end use, while balancing
supply and demand.
All the needed data must be available at our fingertips to
make optimal decisions instantly, and more automatically – hands
and eyes free. This all requires new digital capabilities to enable
business agility and scalability both up and down with end-to-end
traceability and business optimization built in to be competitive in the
marketplace.
AI helps make data useful
Key to making AI work is collecting data in huge quantities –
and keeping it stored to let AI work its magic.
Modern paper, board and pulp mills produce huge amounts
of data. For example, there can easily be tens of thousands of
data tags in their operational systems, measuring the properties
of the product or the status of the machinery. The frequency of the
measurements is typically seconds or even milliseconds, which
leads to terabytes of data very soon.
In such an environment, it is a tempting idea to optimize OT/
IT hardware capacity and delete the history data in the systems, or
to aggregate the data in a data warehouse and similar solutions.
This is definitely not a good idea. The value of data is many times
more than the hardware cost to store it.
Process data is the raw material that the machine learning
algorithms need to create mathematical models that help operators,
engineers and managers improve mill operation. These models are
used to detect anomalies in the sensor or equipment functioning,
to predict product quality with virtual sensors or to avoid unplanned
stops by predicting upcoming machine failures. They also help
process engineers identify how they can achieve certain process or
product targets.
History data helps cope with process changes and the
introduction of new machinery, new devices, and sensors. That
information can be used as additional contextual information by the
mathematical models or at least to help process engineers and data
scientists understand the origin of changes in the process data.
Significant process changes may be a good reason to delete old
process data, but even then, the data could still be useful for certain
objectives, for example, predictive maintenance of old equipment
still used in the new process.
Human involvement only where needed
The long-term target, besides continuous process
optimization, now seems to be to enable operator mobility. In
future, the systems take care of standard events without operator
involvement.
Incoming raw materials are automatically identified,
Figure 4: Consumers drive sustainability and the tissue business
produced units are automatically labelled, optimal production sizes
are automatically calculated and sent to automation, produced waste
It is time for our industry to move on from silos and start
is automatically detected and connected to produced units.
collaborating, innovating, and together creating more new common
Do we in future need full-time winder operators or can
capabilities and ways of working across borders, rather than
operators do something else while the machine does the routine
continue pursuing individual interests. There are massive further
work? Raw materials can be automatically transferred to the correct
efficiency gains possible for the industry and the planet when the
machines at the correct time. When something goes wrong or
wider ecosystem value and opportunities are recognized and acted
operator decisions are needed, the system will ask the operator for
upon.
support through mobile.
“TietoEVRY is committed to actively driving and further
Data and collaboration build a brighter future
developing digital capabilities together with our customers and
Working in and for the fibre industry is an excellent
extensive ecosystem network to bring even more value to the
opportunity to be part of the change journey and contribute to the
industry. A solid foundation exists already for taking further
greater good – and the future of our planet.
steps on the future autonomous journey”, says Carsten Henke.
We can build a brighter future together.
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