Data-driven solution for safer and smarter operations at Valmet
After a fire caused a data loss in a test facility, Valmet committed to ensuring that no valuable test data would be at risk again. Through a pioneering partnership with Nortal, Valmet merged Operational Technology (OT) with Information Technology (IT) to create a customized, resilient, data-driven solution that prioritizes safety and efficiency. This project is part of a larger initiative under Valmet’s Factory IT program, a new strategic focus area designed to enable business excellence through modular capabilities and a scalable, extendable IT service offering for factory operations.
Service
Industry
Valmet, a leading global developer and supplier of process technologies, automation, and services for the pulp, paper, and energy industries, ensures quality by rigorously testing its products in a precise testing environment equipped with hundreds of condition monitoring sensors. Valmet’s test bench has significantly more product-specific sensors than those found on the customer’s factory floor, ensuring product quality.
A few years ago, a fire broke out at the Valmet Rautpohja factory in Finland during a roll test, destroying one of the test rigs used for testing paper machine rolls (SymRoll). Fires during roll testing are extremely rare, but in such uncommon situations it is important to ensure that test data is recovered to a safe location and easily accessible.
“Back then, we stored local data near the operator’s room, and we weren’t able to save all our test run data,” says Timo Ollila, Product Manager, Deflection compensated rolls, Board and Paper Mills Business Unit, Valmet. “With our old system, only data about the last test runs was available, and not easily accessible either.”
Capturing crucial data from roll test runs
The test environment is an accurate and data critical environment, where accurate data collection is non-negotiable. Every sensor measurement and video feed are vital to understanding performance and ensuring safety. It’s in this environment where data concerning sensors, roll inspection, startup recipes, and video needs to be collected, captured, and transmitted to the cloud. Because any data that isn’t in the cloud is at risk of not being able to be efficiently analyzed.
Timo Ollila’s brief to Nortal had three requirements:
- Valmet needed to collect accurate data and keep it in a safe place.
- The data needed to be available, meaning visible, visualizable, and not complicated to get.
- Valmet wanted a suite of tools that would deliver tangible business value to Valmet and enable them to effectively leverage their data.
Valmet’s pioneering solution in the heavy industry
Nortal’s Cloud Architect Anssi Pannula and the rest of the team set to work to develop an IT/OT integration using the latest technologies. “Our solution collects data from the new test rig at the Rautpohja factory using 3,000 sensor tags that measure temperature, speed, pressure, flow and vibration, among many others” says Pannula, “and all of it is sent to Microsoft Fabric in near real time. Video is captured by four cameras, and all footage is stored in OneLake in Microsoft Fabric. With OneLake File Explorer, users can easily open and view videos directly through Windows File Explorer on their laptop.”
If a similar accident were to occur in the future, Valmet could now quickly grasp the sequence of events and restore normal production more efficiently, eliminating the need for extensive time and manual efforts to identify the cause. "We can now use data to identify any issues in roll testing and take preventative actions with the future in mind”, says Ollila. Along with enhanced safety, this solution also enables Valmet to collect and analyze large amounts of data in near real time. This capability supports the evaluation of various test rig configurations and the comparison of test runs, helping to identify the optimal settings and parameters for more efficient operations.
Ollila says that the system provides machine operators with visual dashboards on Grafana, also developed by Nortal, alongside their trending tools. “If something happens during the test run, they can contact the roll engineers. Telemetry data supports fact-based decision-making by showing detailed insights, such as pressure and flow patterns. We can see what happens and if there are any broken components in the roll, which if detected early, can mean huge cost savings. We can do full testing without building separate measuring units. All of this is made possible by the comprehensive solution Nortal has delivered.”
Nortal’s Business Area Director, Petri Rönkkö, says that Valmet’s modern cloud-based solution is not that common in the heavy industry. “Consumer-facing businesses are quickly adopting cloud technologies and ways of working, but in manufacturing, factories still do a lot of manual work in a siloed local on-premises environments, each with their own tools and systems. These kinds of solutions offer a comprehensive view of what’s happening on the shop floor. Unlocking the data is great on the factory floor, but it also supports top management needs when data siloes are broken down.”
– Petri Rönkkö, Vice President Forest, Manufacturing and Services, Nortal Finland
Valmet’s solution is designed with scalability in mind. The same platform capabilities can be re-used in other use cases as well to save money in the future and avoid point solutions for each separate use case.
A collaborative approach to success
What made it possible to achieve all this in six months from start to finish? Valmet says it’s because of how the team was structured and worked together. Teemu Vento, Global Operations, Factory IT Lead, Valmet, calls this an agile way of working in cohesive collaboration. “It was an MVP, so neither party knew exactly what we’d discover. For me, the best thing was the ability to make decisions along the way.”
“There were three players in the team,” says Timo Ollila. “Valmet business, Valmet IT, and Nortal. That meant we had to have an open dialogue during the development process. Together we defined and clarified our needs, made compromises and constantly discussed between the three parties to make an optimal solution. I’m a mechanical engineer, not an IT specialist. I define our needs and Nortal and Valmet IT turned those into technical solutions fit for Valmet’s factory environment. The co-operation was smooth and the active dialogue between parties was the key to success in this project.”
Data-driven scale
With more than 19,000 employees and 60 production units worldwide, Valmet is excited about the opportunities to scale this Data Collection and Visualization Solution to be used in other Valmet factories and different use cases in future.
“We have plans to scale this solution and realize the benefits of the solution in wider at Valmet”, says Vento. “So far, we’ve tested many rolls with the new rig and the process continues. Over the next year, we’ll see the real benefits, as the biggest savings will come from the new way of running the rolls. With a semi-automated process, reaction times are improved, and it’s quicker to conduct tests.”, Ollila says.
Ollila believes that the key to a successful project is properly describing its scope in as much detail as possible — the more work done up front, the smoother everything goes. From Nortal’s side, it might be said that if there’s one skill beyond IT that we’ve keenly developed and put into practice over our 35 years in the business, it’s the ability to listen.
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