Valmet’s services are comprehensive, covering everything from maintenance outsourcing to mill and power plant upgrades and spares. Pulp mills, tissue, board and paper manufacturing lines and bioenergy power plants form the core of Valmet’s strong technology offering.  In accordance with its vision, the company's goal is to be the best in the world in serving its customers.

”More and more of our customers want to buy demanding servicing and maintenance services from the original equipment manufacturer, which would be us. There is also growing demand for long-term contracts in paper machine wear and spare parts supply. Paper machines are very complicated and have a large number of very expensive parts that wear in production use. We wanted to develop a model that would allow us to identify the factors that influence their life cycles and the optimisation of production use,” says Pekka Linnonmaa, Director, Paper Technology, EMEA, at Valmet.

“We analysed the need, available data and desired outcome using our agile service model,” says Juha Raunama from Houston Analytics.“Our job was to help them to forecast paper machines’ servicing needs more efficiently and to help optimise production. In collaboration, we created an automated predictive analytics solution for business operations.”

Data was collected from 6,500 sensors on the Valmet customer’s paper machine."We use reports based on advanced analytics to develop a life cycle model. With the data from the sensors we can reduce the risk of unscheduled shutdowns,” says Linnonmaa.

“Thanks to the headway we have made with the development of the lifecycle model of the roll covering, our customer has been able to extend the servicing interval from five to six weeks. This means substantial direct savings for each roll covering. A single paper machine has from two to ten roll coverings. Production reliability also improves. We can offer our customers more comprehensive advisory services,” says Linnonmaa.

“Our co-operation with Houston Analytics is based on an agile co-operation model under which they provide us with their advanced expertise in data. They have also provided us with significant added value in improving the efficiency of an industrial process machine though collaboration with our experts.