Why maintaining paper and board machine’s web inspection and web monitoring systems is so crucial?

A paper mill contains machines, equipment and systems, which have to work seamlessly together in order to achieve high performance- and quality production output. High quality and regular maintenance are required to prevent hiccups in performance. Maintenance needs to be systematically managed, planned, and promptly executed according to a preventive maintenance plan.

The performance of the paper machine is the most crucial and difficult part of any paper mill. Many things can go wrong and cause losses in performance and added costs like energy and chemicals when the machine is not making sellable paper. Web inspection and web monitoring systems are key equipments to indicate upcoming process defects and find the root causes behind them. Therefore, these systems themselves must be in perfect shape all the time to keep the whole process in an optimal state. Without regular maintenance, systems cannot provide sharp images and correct analysis of paper web anomalies.

If the health monitoring system of the process is unhealthy, how you can ensure the process itself can be healthy over time? Customers use a lot of CAPEX money for the new system investment and payback during the system lifecycle is depending on how well the system performs over time, not only some months after the project period.

Investment in regular and systematical maintenance results in big savings

Maintaining web inspection and web monitoring systems is part of the paper and board mill’s industrial asset management. As a rule of thumb, it is more cost-effective to invest in maintenance and deal with problems straight away rather than wait until later, when the problems may become even more costly and complicated to solve. In camera systems, this becomes extra important because some defects are challenging to detect.

Without a doubt, inadequately maintained paper mill’s WIS and WMS systems, just like any other systems if inadequately maintained, will require more expensive service at some point in time. What we often do not notice, are the costs that are the result of an underperforming process. These cost effects develop slowly, in a longer time scale, but often are very high resulting in lost production and quality problems. All this can be avoided by making scheduled maintenance throughout the system’s lifecycle. This also ensures a longer lifetime for the WIS and WMS systems. We call this smart investment management.

When maintenance is well planned, the system maintenance actions can be scheduled to mills planned shutdowns before systems performance are lowered or generate serious problems. A well-made maintenance plan gives many benefits also to the maintenance management and paper mill operators.

Now the question arises, how well-maintained and up-to-date are your WIS and WMS systems? Have you trained your own people regularly and do you have a scheduled maintenance program for your camera systems?

If you want to secure your investment over the lifecycle and ensure it´s the best possible pay-back, Procemex is ready to help and support you.

Author: Ari-Pekka Räisänen, Director, Customer Service & Product Development