Value-Added Information.. A High Payback Investment for the Mill, 1992 Process Control, Electrical & Info. Conference Proceedings

This paper describes the "information predicament" that exists in most pulp and paper mills - namely that of having separate bodies of information that are used to operate the mill. Traditionally the mill used these disparate bodies of information to run all mill operations.

The world-wide quality movement of the 1990’s has caused pulp and paper mills to look for new concepts that will aid them in meeting customer quality demands, and remaining cost competitive. This paper shows that integrating all mill process, production and quality data, and "adding-value" to this unified information, will be of great benefit to the mill.

In order to gain this benefit, mills need a way to gather large bodies of process, quality, production and business information, store it in a central database and present it to the right people in the mill. This paper will briefly describe "MOPS, Mill Optimization System", an information-management tool with this capability.

The returns from this integrated body of information are shown to be good, and the concept of "information investment" is explored. An investment in value-added information can be more important to the mill than a similar investment in processing equipment.

Three Canadian pulp and paper mills, that implemented their integrated information system using MOPS, will in this paper describe how their system was implemented, the return on investment, and in what specific areas the results were achieved.