Sheet Breaks are Expensive

Sheet breaks are a pain in the you-know-what and they are probably costing you more than you know.

Let’s take a close look at a very small example:

Mill A is a small recycle facility that makes roughly 65,000 tons/year of boxboard, or about 200 tons/hour.  Let’s assume their cost for recycled paper is $150 per ton and that they experience about two breaks a day.  It takes that mill roughly 20 minutes to get everything back online and back up to speed after a break.

When you run the numbers, this mill is losing – just in terms of the sourcing cost of the paper they utilize – about $300,000 each year.  Their sales loss is significantly higher, probably upwards of $1.2 million dollars each year.  If you assume that about 30% of the breaks are due to variations in freeness,  then the cost of variable freeness at this mill is at least $300,000 each year in lost production.

$300,000.   

And that’s for a small mill with only a couple of breaks a day.  How much paper do you think this mill has to sell to make up for that $300,000?

So, here's a question for you:  

How much money is variable freeness costing you? 

It's a real pain. 

Drainac Performance Maintenance Program

I visit a lot of mills around the country and one thing that's common among just about all of them is that nobody has all of the maintenance people they'd like to have or need. 

That means that key equipment doesn't always get the attention it needs, when it needs it. In the best case, the equipment doesn't work as well as it should for as long as it should.  In the worst case, you get equipment that doesn't work at all and a hefty price tag to get it back into service.

 

We’d like to help.

We have just announced a new program for our valued Drainac customers, <drum roll> the Drainac Performance Maintenance Program.

Under this new program, we'll send one of our qualified Drainac technicians to your mill on a regular basis to assess your system and make sure it’s working as it should.  We’ll repair or replace any necessary parts, recalibrate the system if needed, provide training to your people and whatever else we need to do to help you get the most out of your Drainac freeness analyzer.

The program covers all necessary travel costs and service labor, plus you’re entitled to a 20% discount on any parts that your system needs.

We have three different levels of Drainac services available to you, or we can craft a custom one to meet your specific needs.  Contact me at your convenience for details.  I’ll be happy to put together a program that will work for you.