Information Management

Management, operations, and maintenance all benefit from a millwide system that gathers process data and helps operators and managers make better decisions

Information System Coordinates Operation at Alabama River Market Pulp Complex

BY ROBERT YEAGER

We've slowed down, and we're making more salable tons," says Robert A. "Pete" Black, vice president/mill manager at the huge Alabama River pulping complex in Claiborne, Ala. "Just a few years ago, only a few
managers made key operating decisions. Now the operators are more involved in running the mills, enabled by the data from our process information system."

Black oversees the operation of the adjacent Alabama River and Alabama Pine market pulp mills, which each produce approximately 400,000 tpy of hardwood and softwood, respectively. The ISO 9002-certified operation ships its pulp worldwide, much of it to a demanding Asian market.

Controlling all of the key processes in this complex are Foxboro IA distributed control systems (DCS). However, as Black puts it, "We found that the DCS systems did a fine job of the minute-to-minute control of each process. But it did not provide the millwide coordination required to optimize the whole facility."

MANAGEMENT WANTS PROCESS DATA. The current management recently came from pulp mills where process information systems made real-time and historical process information readily available, and production summaries were produced automatically for the morning managers' meetings.

"We knew the value of these information tools," says Black, "so we soon decided to install one in these mills." The system selected was the PI process
information system from OSI Software (San Leandro, Calif.). The PI system was installed in August 1995 and now, with about 100 mill users, monitors 5,500 DCS points throughout the facility. Plans call for monitoring two or three thousand additional points in the near future.

"We're constantly adding new users," says Ron Oudenaarden, senior systems analyst at Alabama River, "and existing users want more capabilities." So the number of process points monitored is steadily on the rise. All PI applications have been internally developed by mill personnel.

At management's request, the first uses of PI at Alabama River focused
on improving millwide coordination. Numeric summaries and key trend plots were developed with standard PI tools to show, at a glance, the day's performance of all mill processes.

"The summaries and trends were well received," says Oudenaarden. "They were immediately used in the morning production meetings and helped everyone to better understand the total operation of the mills."

Previously, each meeting participant prepared their own handouts, taken from laboratory and DCS data. The PI
displays, along with Excel spreadsheets generated by the system's Datalink
Add-In, now provide this data automatically, eliminating manual handout preparation entirely.

SYNCHRONIZING THE MILLS. Use of the PI displays soon showed the opportunity for big gains from tighter process synchronization across the mills. This led to the development of "RateSurge," an application designed to coordinate millwide process production rates and surge-tank levels in real-time.

Synchronization required that all process and tank-level targets be
redefined, so multi-department management meetings produced new setpoints for every process and surge tank in the mill. "That, in itself, was a big job," says Oudenaarden, "since it had never been done before."

Once targets were established, Oudenaarden developed the RateSurge application in about five weeks, using the Visual Basic tools available with the PI system. "I had no prior Visual Basic experience," he says, "so I was learning Visual Basic as I developed the application." RateSurge is now integral to the mills' operations.

A glance at the application shows why it is so popular. Its simple overview screen (Figure 1) provides a bird's-eye view of each mill, showing all key processes (circles) and surge tanks (squares), starting with the digesters and proceeding through the blowtanks, washers, washed-stock tanks, brown high-density tanks, CLO2 station, bleaching, high-density bleach tank, dryers, and bailing line. Recovery and recausticizing are included as well.

The familiar red (danger), yellow (caution), and green (O.K.) color schemes are used to show the deviation of the processes from their targeted rates and tanks from targeted levels. "If the overview screen is green, we know that mill is running well," notes Oudenaarden. In fact, "Keep it in the green. It's as easy as PI," is now a familiar slogan, prominently displayed in the complex's production coordination office.

Should an overview icon show yellow or red, a click of the mouse allows a user to "drill down" and gain a more detailed view of process or tank operation. A "speedometer," like that of an automobile, shows the actual process or tank condition (Figure 2). Action recommendations are also provided when process or tank conditions deviate significantly from target.

"In the past, operators focused on their own process and had little information about the others," says Oudenaarden. "Coordination relied on phone conversations between operators to communicate information about process upsets." This led to frequent process rate changes, with resulting decreases in quality, efficiency, and salable production. RateSurge encourages coordination by allowing everyone to be aware of desired and actual process and tank conditions across the mill.

Below the speedometer, a window shows rate-of-change and time-to-go before encountering "imminent danger." A flashing symbol shows that the process is running at a rate substantially different than that recommended. In this window, green is "O.K.," yellow is "caution," blue is "catch-up," and red is "danger." A mouse click brings up the problem description and recommended action.

Process operators now see their own production rates and tank levels, plus those of their immediate upstream and downstream processes. They also view the quality of any process in the mill (Figure 3). They are encouraged to review trends and sort out causes of problems. Process conditions can be recalled for any time period, though convenient "shortcut" buttons provide the last 4-hour, 12-hour, 7-day, or 30-day periods.

"I see all of the processes feeding mine, so I know the rate and quality of product coming to me," says A.D. Hollinger, operator for the dryers-the final production process. "But I can also see how the whole mill is running, not just my process. That's a big help to me, as a part of the whole team."

Alabama River management loves the mill overview capability. "My first stop of the morning is the process information system, to see how the plant is running," says Black. "After that, I typically go back to the system about three times a day."

SUMMARIZING THE SHIFT AND DAY. At the end of a standard 12-hour shift, team
managers and key operators hold a "shift exchange" meeting, allowing the new and old shifts to review the previous operations, discuss potential problems, and review the goals for the upcoming shift. The meeting is facilitated by a shift coordinator. The PI data is projected on a screen, and RateSurge is the primary communications tool at these meetings. "We use the displays to identify the bottlenecks for the new shift and explore alternative ways to eliminate them," says Dave Dunham, reliability manager.

RateSurge also now provides all of the necessary information for the daily production meeting, including an hour-by-hour display of key quality and
production data for the entire day. All data is shown with its target range, so performance against target can be seen at a glance. "All our key people now have total mill visibility," adds Dunham. "So, there are virtually no surprises anymore."

Typically, at the morning meeting, attendees use the overview display, clicking on the title bars, beginning with the Kamyr digesters and proceeding through the mill. Any attendee may be asked to present the data for that morning, moving though all the production processes and surge tanks and commenting on the day's operation. "It's been a marvelous training medium," says Dunham.

RateSurge was installed in the mills in June 1996. The initial rollout included the overview, plus tank and process details. A "quality summary" was introduced in September. A "forecasting"
module was added in October, with "rate deviations" introduced in January. For all the components, the development effort took about three months. "It's an extraordinarily low investment, when we consider the enormous returns to the mill," notes Black.

BIG VALUE IN BASIC PROCESS DATA. Using the Excel add-ins, system users can also trend, analyze, and compare all types of process data, determining process relationships and analyzing the root causes of equipment failure. "Our maintenance people now routinely use the process information system to solve chronic
reliability problems," says Dunham. "In the past, we would simply live with a high failure-rate component. Now we get to the cause of that high failure
condition and take action to correct it."

The use of Excel also allows Alabama River's mill people to build their own trending, charting, and reporting applications. The Excel add-ins automatically populate Excel spreadsheets and show charts and graphs as required (with help from the Microsoft "Wizards," if needed). Technical department users report that they're able to analyze process data in ways that would have been previously impossible, due to the inaccessibility of the historical process information.

"Every week someone describes a new process insight provided by the process information system," says Oudenaarden. Most of those insights lead to lower process variation, which means better product quality and higher efficiency for the mill.

Dunham administers the purchased-power contract with the local power company, so he uses the system to track daily power consumption. He has also built screens to provide the powerhouse with useful real-time and historical
information. "The DCS is a fine tool for process control," says Dunham, previously a DCS engineer. "But it has its limitations for analysis and reporting, which is where the process information system shines. For our new users, it's like opening the shades and letting the light in."

The middle managers and supervisors at Alabama River also regularly acquire process data for diagnostics and troubleshooting. Users build their own displays to obtain exactly the output needed from the system. "We probably couldn't do a tenth of our present level of coordination between departments without PI and RateSurge," says Dunham. "They're very important communications tools."

The mills also track lost time very closely, since lost production means lost revenue. When a process goes below its target rate for more than an hour, a rate deviation report (RDR) is automatically generated, showing all key process parameters, plus tons lost due to off-target operation. The process operator then describes the cause with an annotation on the system display.

Every RDR requires an operator response. A monthly process information system report shows production losses and reasons for the lost time. This report helps determine failure statistics on various process elements, guiding future maintenance efforts. "Production duration" curves are also created for the digesters and the dryers, and that data is compared with other mills for benchmarking purposes.

Other daily and monthly system reports show turbine generator production, power consumption, and power flows to and from utilities. An internally developed model takes the process information data from various powerhouse sources, combines it with cost data from accounting, and shows the most efficient way to generate future power requirements. The Alabama River accounting department also uses the process information system to track consumption of key fuels and chemicals.

"The system produces many daily reports that would be virtually impossible to do manually," says Dunham. "Once the end users find they can develop their analyses and reporting themselves, the uses of PI multiply geometrically."

Anecdotal evidence abounds. "A foreman from the kraft mill used to go throughout the mill reading tank levels at the end of the month and pass that data to accounting," says Dunham. Now that information is automatically collected and put into an Excel spreadsheet.

"One really difficult situation occurred when we couldn't get steam through the pulp dryer," Dunham adds. "Using PI data, we traced all the steam flows, condensates, and returns, and we found the problem to be a bad level transmitter in a condensate collection tank." The transmitter was replaced and the steam flow returned once again. "Before installing the process information system, it would have been hit or miss to track down that problem."

ROI IS ENORMOUS. PI and RateSurge have shown their economic worth again and again, according to mill managers. "When we consider the impact that RateSurge has had on our mills, the project's return on investment surely has to be one of the best in my experience," says Black.

Production and quality are better than ever, Black adds. The mill consistently produces prime pulp, and off-grade production is typically associated with startups and shutdowns. "Our customers are intrigued by PI," he says. "We routinely take them through PI and RateSurge as part of our presentation on the mill."

Operators now have actionable real-time information, so they can make decisions that traditionally were reserved for the superintendent level people. "We've married the process information system with a change in philosophy empowering the operators to make the key operating decisions," says Black. "It's a cultural change as well, allowing people millwide to make decisions at every level."

The change is paying off. "We topped prior production records in 1996, and should exceed that by 20,000 tons in 1997. The process information system played a key role in achieving those
successes. It has even exceeded what we had hoped to accomplish with the system," adds Black.

PLANS FOR THE FUTURE. Alabama River has ambitious plans for its process information system. They are actively working on real-time costing, so process operators can see the cost consequences of their decisions. This has already been implemented in the bleach plant. "First we went for quality," says Dunham. "Now that we're happy with the quality results, we will start driving down the cost." The real-time costing
initiative is a major step toward that end.

A new plant maintenance system is planned, and it will receive usage data from the process information system. Maintenance is also looking at valve verification, whereby valve position, flow rate, and setpoint are checked by the system to ensure the valve is operating properly. A "PI Pager" will soon be used to provide alarms to anyone needing them in or out of the mill.

Now that mill users understand Excel, they will be encouraged to use Visual Basic to build new process information applications. Visual Basic is embedded into Microsoft Office '97 programs (i.e., Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Access), giving each of them more potential power as a processing and reporting tool. "The use of Visual Basic will grow dramatically over the next couple of years," says Oudenaarden.

The PI "ProcessBook," using Windows '95, is scheduled to be introduced to the mills in late 1997. Since ProcessBook strictly adheres to Microsoft Windows standards, it will readily accommodate Microsoft's Active-X component-based technologies in the future and allow "best-of-breed" software products to seamlessly plug into the system, providing such improvements as 3-D graphing, voice interface, and Internet operations.

ProcessBook also comes equipped with a library of process objects for creating process diagrams. "As we move to ProcessBook, we will create more and more diagrams using the object library," says Oudenaarden. The next release of ProcessBook will have Visual Basic add-ins in addition to the widely used Excel add-ins that the mills currently use.

As key process relationships are better understood, the process information system will be used more proactively. For example, when a DCS process alarm occurs, the system will search for the potential causes, showing them to the operator along with recommended corrective actions. Mill purchasing will also soon be able to call for key tank levels and actual rates of usage, with alerts as to when reorder points have been reached.

The online "Help" function will be expanded beyond just the RateSurge application into the processes themselves. For example, operator instructions will be put online, placing the most appropriate instruction in front of the operator for a specific process alarm. Online help then becomes "just in time help" and is provided only when needed.

"We now have about 18 months worth of process information data and will soon begin to use the data as a help in making new capital investment decisions," says Black. As an example, management feels that the softwood mill's digester may be too closely coupled to the bleach plant, in which case a larger surge tank may be needed. The PI data, in conjunction with another mill-developed model, will help them in making that decision.

"We've barely tapped the power of this system, and we'll continue to expand its functions to turn real-time and historical data into useful information for the people running the processes," adds Black.