Customer story: how Nordfjord Paper cut unplanned stops in half
Fourteen mills, three countries, 900 monitored assets. Ingrid Solberg on what changed and what she would tell another operations lead.
Halden Systems Newsroom - - 1 min read
Nordfjord Paper runs 14 mills across Norway, Sweden and Finland. Two years ago unplanned stops on refiners and dryer sections were its largest single cause of lost production. We asked Ingrid Solberg, VP Operations, to describe the programme in her own words.
Why predictive maintenance
"We had tried it before with another vendor and it produced noise. Hundreds of alerts, nobody trusted them, the system was switched off within a year. What was different this time was the sequencing. Halden insisted on starting with the five machines at each mill that had actually stopped us, and on naming an owner for every alert before it went live."
The rollout
"Mill by mill, roughly six weeks each. The first eight weeks at every site were calibration and we were told not to expect results in that period, which was honest and turned out to be right. By the end of two years we had around 900 monitored assets."
What changed
"Unplanned stops on monitored equipment fell by just under half across the group. The first alert that mattered was a refiner bearing at our largest mill; we replaced it in a planned stop ten days later and the old bearing was visibly failing. That one event covered the cost of the programme."
What she would tell another operations lead
"Name the owners first. Start small. Do not report numbers in the calibration period. And put the Halden reliability engineer in your monthly maintenance meeting, not in a separate call."
The engineering lessons from this and other programmes are in three lessons from rolling out predictive maintenance across 40 sites.
