KELLY H. FERGUSON is editor ofPulp & Paper Magazine

Papermaking

A new blade system that can improve sheet formation by generating fiber activity on the wire is profiled.

 

P&P reports on how a new wet end former installed on Lake Superior Paper’s SC machine in Duluth, Minn., improves product quality, mill competitive position.

 

Papermachine Clothing

How mills can improve performance is examined using case histories to illustrate troubleshooting techniques.

Why oh, why oh, Y2K?

In the closing months of 1998, my spouse gravely asked if I was concerned about the onboard computer in our family sedan. Now we have a new car (it didn’t help that the transmission died in our old car).

Now that it’s 1999—after a year or so of eerie quiet from the paper industry—reports are beginning to suggest that pulping, papermaking, and converting processes could be inadvertently shut down when the time-date stamps in all those well-controlled machines read 00:00:01 on 01/01/00 instead of 01/01/2000. I envision a Pulp & Paper Week headline that reads, “Entire paper industry takes unscheduled downtime; prices set for dramatic increase.”

DO THEY MAKE Y2K BUG STRIPS? Pulp & Paper published an article in February 1998 (p. 79) that interviewed experts on whether there was an impending crisis on mill operating floors. One of the major problems is that due to the proliferation of gauges, sensors, transmitters, control systems, etc., installed during the past few decades of automation, there can be literally thousands of devices and systems to inventory and check.

As the article points out, there can be many problems in OEM setups, and the only way to really determine the severity of the problem is to test. “However,” as one expert noted, “the number of available testing days—which implies downtime—between now and the year 2000 is very limited.” Another vision is of mill control gurus racing against the giant ball that drops in New York’s Times Square, trying to replace that one last faulty microchip.

During the second week of January 1999, “The Bug” and the paper industry made national news when the Wall Street Journal reported from Wisconsin Rapids on efforts by Consolidated Papers and other industrial manufacturers across the country to eliminate the Y2K threat. The article opened with Consolidated’s Dale Wroblewski resetting the time on “a giant paper cutter” to 11:59:30 p.m. on Dec. 31, 1999. “Thirty seconds later,” the article states, “the screen goes haywire, displaying the date as 1/01/100 and spitting out a line of gibberish every second.”

Welcome to the end of the 1st Century, Mr. Wroblewski! As a supplier representative looked on, the machine continued to run, the article says, but gone was the ability to control the automatic slitters. So much for automated slitting technology.

Consolidated and other companies are hard at work on the Herculean task of testing, taking inventory, and fixing all the “buggy” areas of their mills. For example, in the WSJ article, Consolidated’s Wisconsin River mill had compiled a list of 30,000 devices and software programs to be checked.

READY OR NOT…Readiness is something the paper industry is struggling with. In a December 1998 report titled “Year 2000 Readiness: Hoping to Squeeze Under the Wire,” Morgan Stanley Dean Witter graded most of the major forest products companies on their preparedness based on the companies’ own required SEC 10-Q filings. While the average grade was a “B” for company business systems, most manufacturing systems received a much lower grade.

Does this mean the paper industry will be able to manage its sales and accounting information, but not actually be able to produce anything to sell? The Morgan Stanley report seems fairly positive that most companies will make the deadline, but the expectation is that readiness for U.S. companies will cost about $1 billion. And the report even predicts a silver lining for companies that can keep producing while their competitors are shut down.

Fixing the problems can be a mixture of simple and complex. The WSJ article talks about Consolidated engineer Bob Elliott walking around the mill with four grocery bags full of microchips, replacing all the bad ones. Some systems might have to be completely replaced. One innovative solution mentioned for Consolidated is that the clock on the “paper cutter” will be reset to 1983—a return to a simpler time.

One way Pulp & Paper wants to help is by publicizing reader comments and examples of Y2K problems they’ve found and, hopefully, fixed. Readers who wish to remain anonymous or keep their company name confidential can note this on their submissions. These examples will be published in our Mill Operations section until December 1999, at which time we’ll probably not be operational. Send your comments to: Kelly Ferguson at kferguson@mfi.com or fax them to (770) 933-0666.

Meanwhile, keep stocking your bunker. The year ’00 is nigh.