Making The Grade: Gaining Insights From Thousands Of PI System Tags

Clearwater Paper is the largest provider of private label tissue to retail grocery chains in the United States and a manufacturer of bleached paperboard. With seven manufacturing sites, over 10 paper machines, over 50 tissue converting lines, and pulp mills, recovery, and power boilers, real-time operational intelligence is critical to the company’s success. A PI System user for over 20 years, Clearwater Paper relies heavily on system insights, but it was a challenge to manually create targets and KPIs for every PI Tag. With the help of Envoy Development, they were able to put the right metrics in place to understand deviations and take appropriate action to keep production on track.

Aggregating Data to Monitor Thousands of PI Tags
With tens of thousands of PI Tags and limited internal resources, the majority of Clearwater’s tags were not monitored. “The vast majority of those tags are just collecting and it’s difficult to put targets and limits on all those tags,” said Troy Foede, West Region Black Belt at Clearwater Paper, during the 2017 OSIsoft Users Conference in San Francisco. These control limits are imperative to understanding asset performance because they quickly help identify deviations in order to prevent quality issues or catastrophic equipment failure. For Clearwater, applying limits is further compounded by the fact that the paper machines run dozens of different grades – often in the same day – and the speed of each process can affect targets and limits.