By Hugh O'Brien
SCA’s Lilla Edet mill, located about 50 km north
of Gothenburg, Sweden, is a very good example of the ‘mega-mill’ concept
that SCA Tissue has been implementing since the mid-1990s.
The idea has been to concentrate tissue production
within the company at fewer but larger production sites
which can give higher production and lower costs.
As
part of this strategy, a rather new tissue PM from
a smaller, now closed mill in Croisset, France, was
moved to Lilla Edet in 1999.
Today the mill manager, or site manager as she is officially
called, a Lilla Edet is Sussan Sandberg. A fast moving
woman who walks at a rapid pace around the mill, Sandberg
is always looking for the next continuous improvement
opportunity which will raise operating efficiency and
increase production even further.
High Demand From Sales
Based on high quality and low cost production, Sandberg
says that Lilla Edet is very often the first choice
for the SCA sales force, or category organization,
when they are sourcing products from the SCA mills. “Our
quality/cost ratio is very good so we quite simply
have too much demand, although I’m not complaining
about it because this is a good problem to have. Our
team focus on continuous improvement helps us get more
tons out of our existing asset base.”
Sandberg believes very strongly in continuous improvement
and points out that production at the mill is up 20%
since 2001. Recently the management and technical departments
have been quite involved in the integration of the
Jönköping,
Sweden, mill since it was purchased in early 2005 when
SCA took over the Munksjö Hygiene business.
This included two mills, one in Sweden and one in Norway.
The Jönköping mill consisted of both papermaking
and converting but now all of the converting operations
have been moved to other locations and the paper machine
is running very well. One very modern Perini Sincro
converting line was moved to Lilla Edet, says Sandberg,
which has helped her to squeeze more production out
of the facility to satisfy the demand.
Lilla Edet today has three PMs, with a total output
of around 100,000 tons per year. Of this, about 60%
is AFH with the remaining 40% being consumer tissue.
The site includes 14 converting lines. The Jönköping
mill now makes about 20,000 tons per year of both AFH
and consumer tissue jumbo reels, with most of it being
shipped to Lilla Edet for converting. There are about
430 employees at Lilla Edet and 20 at Jönköping.
Getting Eveybody Involved
Sandberg joined SCA in 1996 initially working in the
corporate R&D lab in Gothenburg. She has a Master
of Science degree in papermaking from North Carolina
State University in the USA and after that she worked
at STFI and Akzo Nobel in Stockholm, where she was
awarded a patent for a wet strength resin concept.
Following R&D
work at SCA for several years, she came to Lilla Edet
in 2004 as paper production manager and soon after
was named site manager. With the integration of the
Munksjö facility in Jönköping, she also
has responsibility for that operation today as well.
A key part of her job, says Sandberg is to make sure
everyone and every department is communicating well
so they can all be moving in the same direction. A
key element in this is the daily morning meeting, which
she feels is critical to involving all areas of the
mill, from raw materials and pulp supply to logistics
and transportation and everything in between, to get
the best results.
“I really enjoy the entire production process
and the challenge that comes with making the whole
thing work,” says
Sandberg. “It takes a high level of teamwork
to get the best results and it is critical that everyone
in the mill feels connected and involved. This is perhaps
the most important job of a site manager: to get all
people working together and to be aware that what they
do has an influence on the success of the entire operation.”
Getting back to her favorite area of continuous improvement,
Sandberg explains that she is pleased that the Jönköping
integration is now completed and that focus on mill
operations can now take priority.
“We had a lot of resources tied up with the
integration. It was a rather complex project which
took up much of our time, especially for the technical
and engineering people, during 2006. It has been very
successful and the cost situation on the existing PM
4 at Jönköping
is now very good and we are running well with a very
slim workforce there. So with that under control we
are very happy to get back to our efficiency and production
improvement work here at Lilla Edet.”
PM 7 Rebuild
A major project to increase drying capacity and slightly
raise operating speed is took place in October 2007
with a 20 day shutdown. Costing on the order of 60
million Swedish crowns ($9 million) the rebuild includes
a new 16' (4875 mm) Metso Yankee dryer, a new Advantage
AirCap Yankee hood including air system and heat recovery
system, minor rebuilds to the wet end, press and Yankee
section, and a new tail threading system. A new crane
system is also being installed.
PM 7 is a Beloit C-former
built in 1967 and modernized several times. Reel trim
width is 3410 mm, and speed 1,500 m/min. The original
Yankee dryer was 15' (4572 mm).
In addition to PM
7, the other machines at the mill include PM 5, a Beloit
unit which was started in 1960 and makes about 75 tons
per day, and PM 8 which is a Valmet crescent former
that was started in France in 1995 and now produces
about 140 tons per day.
Pulp Supply
Lilla Edet is fortunate to have a couple of things
working in its favor in the drive to keep costs down,
says Sandberg. “When
you look at the cost drivers in this mill, or any tissue
mill, it simply comes down to people, fiber and energy.
We are always looking very closely at these costs and
working hard to optimize them. A key factor in our
success here has been the fact that we use a very high
percentage of recycled fiber.”
About 85% of the mill’s fiber requirements are
covered by the recycled fiber line (RCF) which processes
150,000 tons per year of sorted office waste (SOW)
and old newspapers (ONP). This gives Lilla Edet a big
advantage although Sandberg acknowledges that the situation
has changed lately as demand for secondary fiber, especially
the high quality sorted office waste (SOW) that Lilla
Edet uses most, has soared due to pressure from the
Chinese buyers. Thus prices have been pushed up, and
supply is tight.
Another factor helping the mill keep costs down is
the sludge combustion plant that was added in 2003.
The Kvaerner fluidized bed unit burns the deinking
sludge that results from processing 150,000 tons per
year of sorted office waste and old newspapers that
are the raw material for the mill.
The resulting sludge amounts to about 50,000 tons per
year and is mixed with bio fuel such as wood chips
and burned in the system, resulting in an energy recovery
of 70 GWh of steam which is used on the paper machines
for drying. Finally, the inorganic ash that remains
after sludge burning is used for various applications
such as road construction.
Logistics In Focus
As far as the future, it is clear that Sandberg has
no lack of ideas to keep her and the mill staff busy. “With
the Munksjö integration
successfully completed,” she says, “I am
very much looking forward to using our positive momentum
and energy in many other projects here. We have lots
of ideas we are working on, such as looking more closely
at getting our converting line efficiency up a bit
to help meet the demand.”
“Another efficiency-improving step will be a
rebuild of the mill’s logistics structure, with
a focus on the consumer side. This is a challenging
area for us as we have a huge variety of articles to
move around and keep track of and that means higher
handling costs that I would like.”
While the capital expenditure is not yet approved,
Sandberg says that the mill is seriously considering
a finished goods warehouse, mainly serving the consumer
tissue sector, as opposed to the AFH products which
are already rather well organized in the ‘high-bay’ warehouse
that dominates the mill site.
Looking further down the road, she sees clear benefits
that would come by widening PM 7 slightly to 3560 mm,
from the present 3410 mm. The current rebuild on the
dry end of PM 7 will size the dry end at 3560 mm so
the next project would need to do the same at the wet
end. This, she says, makes very good sense as it would
make PM the same width as PMs 5 and 8, which would
be a big advantage for interchangeability of parts.
Of course the wider sheet would also mean higher production
from the machine and very importantly, it would better
fit the trim widths of the converting lines, thus giving
less trim waste.
All told, Lilla Edet is looking to
make lots of small improvements which add up to a big
positive change. It is all a work in progress taking
it one step at a time, or perhaps several steps at
a time considering the speed with which Sussan Sandberg
races around the mill, to make sure the operation continues
to keep its mill efficiency high and its operating
costs low. TW
