15th January, 2003

how to add value and get the best roi for your paper mill

Improved maintenance practices may be one of the fastest return on investment opportunities for mill owners. Ensuring that mill assets are maintained optimally with minimal spares inventories can add significant value to operations.

A Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) such as IMPACTxp equips an organization with the essential tools to make a preventive maintenance strategy successful.

Increasing productivity, improving efficiency, reacting quickly to customers’ changing needs, and increased profitability are constant issues for mill production managers. The battle is always to add value to the production process.

The main requirement of the industry is therefore to minimize the chance of an unexpected breakdown and increase production. Mills can maximize output, minimize costs, meet organizational goals and add value by taking a closer look at asset management solutions.

Many organizations undertake maintenance on a reactive basis, after breakdown of equipment has already occurred. Stoppages are therefore unscheduled, production is disrupted, and resources may not be available, resulting in extended downtime. This may subsequently see organizations facing loss of production, non-recovery of overheads, process restart costs, lost sales and ultimately, lost customers.

With 20 years of bringing CMMS solutions to a large variety of clients, IMPACTxp is recognized as a leading product in the industry for planned maintenance management.

IMPACTxp is able to offer solutions to help:

Plan preventative maintenance, increasing the reliability of assets, minimizing the chance of breakdown so adding value to the production process.
Predict maintenance based on condition and usage data with the ability to interface with mill equipment through the Generic Interface Module of IMPACTxp.
Minimize spare part inventories and consolidate stock levels in multi-site mill organizations.

A whole host of further financial benefits can also be achieved including:

Reduction of inventory stock outs
Reduction of scrap
Reduction of lost time
Extension of asset life
Reduction of capital expenditure
Reduction in the unit cost of production

SoftSols (North America), part of SoftSols Group provides these specialist maintenance solutions for the forest products and paper industry in North America based on its software product IMPACTxp.

A recent partnership with Protech Solutions based in Western Canada is central to expansion plans for the SoftSols Group who already have a strong foothold in the industry supplying companies such as Millar Western Forest Products in Alberta, St Regis Paper and BPB in the UK and Bunning Forest Products in Australia.

Millar Western have been using IMPACTxp in their brand new saw mill in Whitecourt, Alberta and intend to introduce the software to their pulp mills throughout 2003.