As a matter of fact, no other term rather than “organism” can better describe a paper mill process. Actually, if we may lead you into such a sequence of comparative examples, pulping may be seen as the “mouth” of such an organism where the raw ‘food’ is chewed with water, the stock preparation can then be imagined as the “stomach” where bolus is pre-digested and made ready for the final use, then the machine is the “organ” where such a precious nourishment is turned into tissues, similarly to what a living body would do.
Water plays an outstanding role in all this, being the key transport lifeblood used to deliver the treated “food” where it has to be used. As any body fluid, water will have to be depurated after use, so the paper mill “organism” will be equipped with kidneys of a variety of shapes and natures (DAF units, polydisk, etc.).
In all this, the managers and operators of the mill are, all together as one, the head, arms and legs of this imaginary body.
As an organism will be checked, for example, by blood work or temperature check, so the paper mill circuit will be and, as such an organism will be subject to infections and to the undesired ingestion of harmful substances to be eliminated or, generally, dealt with, a paper mill circuit could suffer about these events as well.
One of our customers asked us to implement exactly this kind of global approach on one of its high speed tissue machine, where the mill suffered from a generally low performance as highlighted by an internal benchmarking process. The initial work done aimed at identifying the root cause of such a reduced performance through the analysis of the cause of breaks and general undesired production losses. It was agreed, after this initial survey, that the basic explanation for the lower comparative production results stayed with felt performance.
