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QES Test Entry/Lab.21 Application at Northwood Pulp Mill

The Situation

Northwood is a two-line kraft pulpmill with a target production of 1560 metric tonnes per day located in Prince George in central British Columbia. The Northwood mill is owned by Canadian Forest Products Ltd., who with 7000+ employees is the largest producer of dimensional lumber and Northern Bleached Softwood Kraft pulp in Canada.

In 1995 Aspen Technology's CIM/21 system was installed. This has since been updated to InfoPlus.21. This mill-level process information system contains about 14,000 active tags. Aspen's History/21, Graphics/21, Event/21 and Analysis/21 are also installed and used by 200+ users.

A Test Entry system was required that would allow test results to be visible throughout the entire mill, providing faster feedback of information with no need to distribute copies. The requirement for validity checks on entered data, automatic time stamping of entries, availability of data for long-terms trends, and automatic determination of derived values were all factors that had to be considered.

The Solution

The Test Entry system developed by QES for use with the PTMS product tracking system is sold as Lab.21 by Aspen Technology Inc, providing an integrated solution for Aspen's series of process information system products. With expert design and configuration assistance from mill production personnel, Lab.21 was implemented in all labs in the mill to provide an integrated mill-wide test data entry system.

Results

The integrated software products from Aspen Technology, used in conjunction with the QES Test Entry/Lab.21 product, provides data analysis and SQC on quality parameters entered via the system. Both mill process and finished product testing are managed with a common user interface.