Pulp and Paper

PI is providing real time cost data for operations to make quick and accurate decisions that immediately effect production costs.
Chris Krumland, Georgia Pacific

Overview

The OSIsoft PI System is a critical foundation for successful implementation of pulp and paper production applications. The PI System is a flexible, powerful and continually growing family of applications and tools that gather, manipulate and make operational information readily available to everyone who needs it—in the proper context for each user and presented in an instantly understandable visual form. The capabilities of the PI System are especially important in today's global economy, as the pulp and paper industry is faced with new challenges to reduce costs and increase profitability.

PI System Solutions

With the combination of thin margins on most paper grades and energy costs at an all time high, mills in North America and Europe are struggling to compete with newer, more efficient mills in developing regions of the world where operating costs are far less and the demand for paper is rapidly increasing. As a result of these global factors, many mills are being forced to take downtime and, in some more unfortunate cases, to shut down mills permanently. Pulp and paper companies are being forced to make more and more difficult operating decisions every day. In order to remain profitable in such trying times, corporations need better access to operating information in order to make more informed decisions on their key performance metrics

Benefits

Many successful pulp and paper companies are maintaining their competitive edge by using the PI System, powered by the PI System, to build a real-time infrastructure across all assets of their enterprise, both to benchmark mill performance and to measure and analyze critical information. In fact, more than 70% of all mills in North America and Europe use the PI System, making it the most widely used process information management system in the worldwide industry.

Gathering the right data and presenting it to the right people at the right time allows operators and managers alike to make informed decisions that support reduced energy consumption, assure high quality control standards, make critical maintenance adjustments, and help troubleshoot process problems. The PI System is used to allocate energy consumption, perform condition-based maintenance, provide environmental data to appropriate governmental agencies, report on production costs in near-real-time, reduce downtime, and monitor mill conditions as variations in the process occur. With instant access to real-time data, pulp and paper companies are able to maintain their competitive edge by leveraging the PI System to make cost-effective decisions in their day-to-day mill operations that directly contribute to the mill’s bottom line. In short, they can successfully compete in the ever demanding global marketplace.