ARTICLE
Essity’s Digital Transformation in papermaking industry
Aiming to break barriers to well-being Essity is a global leading company in hygiene and health. Present in 150 countries with more than 148.000 employees Essity has three business areas: professional hygiene, health, and medical and Consumer goods.
With a broad range of products and brands continuous innovation is part of the company’s core strategy which makes digital transformation throughout the different areas the most obvious and efficient way to fill its focus on improving people’s lives.
Essity has been mainly focusing on digital transformation efforts in connecting data-driven products and solutions, digital customer experience and e-commerce, virtual knowledge and education communities, and analytics and automation and robotics in manufacturing.
Photo: Essity Gien / © Essity
Essity’s digital transformation strategy created an opportunity for a productive partnership with ANDRITZ, with a Metris OPP Contract. At Gien, the company has one of its main factories, producing 2.6 million rolls - Lotus toilet paper and Okay paper towels - and 7 million Lotus-branded handkerchiefs per day.
ANDRITZ and Essity have developed 10 optimization projects in the tissue machine for consistency controls which led to a technical improvement in consistency and percentage of variability.
ANDRITZ: What was the situation of the mill stability before the Metris OPP contract?
Patrícia Teixeira: High process variability and sheetbreaks.
ANDRITZ: What led Essity to decide on ANDRITZ digital solutions?
Patrícia Teixeira: The Metris platform has several applications that help us with analysis and decision-making in papermaking processes. With DATA ANALYTICS applications, we can easily analyze process behavior and identify problems in a visual way. The application of MACHINE LEARNING helps us analyze more complex problems and understand where we need to focus to improve machine performance. APPLICATION STUDIO allows us to develop advanced control logic to optimize the process, increasing production capacity and bringing savings.
Fines TAD – Level Control
ANDRITZ: How ANDRITZ solutions are contributing to Essity’s Strategic priorities for profitable and sustainable growth?
Patrícia Teixeira: The tools in the Metris platform help us to do quicker and clearly analysis of the process behavior and identify problems, helping in discussions with the process team and facilitating decision making.
ANDRITZ: Which projects were developed to improve this situation?
Patrícia Teixeira: Advanced Process Controls (APCs) to stabilize tank consistencies and Control Loop tuning to reduce flow variability in refiners.
ANDRITZ: Did you get concrete results from these projects?
Patrícia Teixeira: Yes, reducing sheet breaks and improving process stability, allowing to increase machine speed.
KPI - Process Variability Comparison - July 2019
KPI - Process Variability Comparison - June 2021
ANDRITZ: How do you see that ANDRITZ's knowledge of processes and its technologies are fostering Essity’s digitalization strategy?
Patrícia Teixeira: The digitalization strategy is supported by advice from the ANDRITZ team in the use of the Metris applications: How to make the daily work of the process team easier by using more friendly apps to follow/analyze the machine.
ANDRITZ: Visualizing the process and its workflows is a key factor in defining where to make adjustments and changes. How did your experience with Metris Plant InSights' Process Display application help to make better decisions to optimize the process?
Patrícia Teixeira: We created the screens of all the processes we work on, making it easier for operators and process engineers to understand when explaining the behavior of the process through the actions of the advanced control. Another feature is the ease of explaining to other colleagues how the advanced control logic works, as well as making it clear to explain the process and follow the control actions.
ANDRITZ: Which were the decisive aspects for the success of ANDRITZ and ESSITY'S partnership?
Patrícia Teixeira: The main aspect of this partnership is ANDRITZ's approach to providing tools for process analysis with DATA ANALYTICS and MACHINE LEARNING, process visualization such as PROCESS DISPLAY application, and advanced control development for process optimization, all on a single platform with interaction between tools. Beyond the tool, the partnership between ANDRITZ and Essity is important for the development of innovative projects, being ANDRITZ experts in technology, and Essity as a large tissue company, we have a team prepared to achieve success.
Metris IIOT Platform / ANDRITZ
ANDRITZ: What are the plans of ESSITY to continue improving Digitalization? How does ANDRITZ fit into this plan?
Patrícia Teixeira: We at Essity always want to improve the data availability of machines by implementing sensors, and optimizing processes to increase production, and reduce chemicals/energy consumption and waste. We have projects in which we want to collaborate with ANDRITZ in the development of new tools that will help with data traceability and better process control to increase production, analyze better the process, and help improve machine efficiency and variability.
