Paper 360
The digitalization of manufacturing processes is becoming increasingly relevant. Whether due to just-in-time processes, labor shortages, or sustainability, the arguments for efficient shopfloor management in paper and board mills are piling up. A 2019 study by McKinsey on “Pulp, paper, and packaging in the next decade” notes: “The industry is well placed to join the digital revolution, as paper and pulp producers typically start from a strong position when it comes to collected or collectable data.”
A key building block toward digitalizing production systems that take advantage of data is a manufacturing execution system (MES) that provides information about the status of production orders. The MES is the data hub linking platform data from the shop floor with data from the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, ideally fully integrated into the other components of the company’s IT.
However, that’s not always a reality at some medium-sized mills, as they might still be quite analogous. In the energy intensive paper and corrugated industry, this is a weakness that could turn into a disaster—especially with regard to upcoming decarbonization and sustainability targets in the European Union (EU) and elsewhere.
SUSTAINABILITY AS AN ECONOMIC FACTOR
Environmental Social Governance (ESG) is no longer simply a moral guideline; the EU Corporate Social Responsibility Directive (CSRD) will make ESG reporting mandatory for many companies from 2025 at the latest. End-to-end, seamless data collection of your plant’s carbon footprint cannot be achieved without specialized software. For state-of-the-art paper and board production, an architecture that provides data structures for recording measurement points is essential to sustainability reporting. Another advantage of a reliable MES is the ability to control production based on sustainability criteria.
What determines MES reliability? Whether pursuing sustainability or other improvements, there are three key capabilities a quality MES should always incorporate.
1. Best match: Optimal integration into your ERP core system.
Every successful producer strives for manufacturing excellence. Nowadays, the choice of a strong and flexible MES is a primary determinant. In fact, it is just as indispensable for producing high-quality goods as the sourcing of fiber and other raw materials. Robert Steindl from the Austrian specialty paper manufacturer delfortgroup AG, for example, appreciates that their “MES solution is completely based on SAP technology and easy to handle. It has met our requirements exactly.”
Smoothly integrating the MES into the ERP core instead of having a multitude of different systems connected enhances the stability tremendously. A closed control loop is established between production and SAP and this vertical integration enables the mill to generate an up-to-date, complete, centralized view of all data relating to the manufacturing process and compile detailed analyses of the data at any time.
2. User-friendly design: Put the mill industry in the focus.
The degree to which production processes are automated in the paper and board industry is impressively high. This makes it important to empower the staff on-site to keep full control. An MES eases the interaction between humans, systems, and machines. A supportive UI concept seamlessly contributes to this interplay. Push news such as event-driven alerts can closely be linked to that, making manual trouble-shooting redundant. Real-time operational transparency benefits largely from cloud migration or a hybrid-friendly design, meaning you can use cloud and on-premise applications in parallel.
Every business has its own requirements; therefore, make sure functions and system language of the MES are tailored to your industry-specific needs. Specialized and experienced implementation partners can suit your individual requirements best.
3. Corporate development: Extended scalability for future projects.
Another pillar of a modern software architecture is its modularity. The chance to be ahead of competitors in terms of IT resilience is again largely rooted in the MES and its connectivity. The more seamlessly adjacent shopfloor processes that rely on MES data are synchronized, the more efficiently and sustainably your production can run. For forward-thinking players in the paper or corrugated industry, this could be, for example, an analysis of MES, sensor, and machine data using artificial intelligence (AI).
Besides other features such as digital maintenance management, one strength of MES is trim optimization planning. The goal: minimizing unused off-cuts. Jeffrey Mueller, vice president and CIO at Chicago-based Pregis, which manufactures protective paper rolls and sheets, emphasizes that they “are able to leverage the trim solution to reduce waste.” After the first roll-out they considered how this could help their other sites.
The concept of a suite with additional modular components can optimally complement your MES or in general give scalability opportunities—whether for short- or longterm projects.
