Service that helps pulp and paper perform

Creating an environment where a customer doesn’t experience any negative impacts resulting from downtime of our systems – that’s the role of service for our pulp and paper customers.

A core part of service is making the human element more efficient – bringing information to people so they can make faster, better, more accurate decisions. Our Quality Control System (QCS) solution is running in mills every single minute of the day during their uptime schedule, measuring performance, production and quality before any roll leaves the machine. Operators rely on the information that it gives them, so any problems can quickly lead to downtime – and no one wants that.

We can of course react quickly, diagnose the problem and get it fixed promptly. But the real value for a customer is in our proactive approach – analyzing and predicting failures, learning from different sites around the world and making on-going adjustments so that the customer never experiences losses. This is what gets me out of bed every morning – giving mills a heads-up display of what’s around the corner and helping them stay ahead of it.  

ABB’s connected solution allows us to optimize the service experience for the customer. With remote servicing, we can bring the whole world to the mill and enable customers to benefit from the global power of ABB expertise – having the right expert, with the right solution on hand at exactly the right moment.

I call this the ‘Iron Man’ suit. When we wrap our customers in ABB service, they can be connected to pulp and paper experts from any part of the world to solve their problem at any time.

Pulp and paper may be transforming towards automation and digitization, but not every mill is ready for higher levels of analytics and remote connections. For example, there are some paper mills that have been in business for half a century and have technology that goes back 30 years. Their priority is in solutions that will help them extend the life of their control systems, not replace them.

We work very closely with mills to identify core extensions they can seamlessly plug in, so we can bring all the benefits of remote servicing to their existing machinery. It means we can have expertise that is aligned to an individual mill’s assets, functions and processes and help on-site personnel solve problems in a much faster and reliable way.

Diagnose, implement, sustain – it’s a three-model approach that helps our customers unlock the value of service. We’ll carry out a diagnostic evaluation of performance to determine if there are points to improve, then we’ll implement an upgrade solution in a programmatic way to help them achieve their goals, and finally sustain those new levels of performance through long-term service.

When you show the value of a solution, when you’re able to help a customer, that’s when you build trust and get the most satisfaction – because when a customer sees you as a trusted advisor, it’s the biggest compliment you can get.