QUALITY ENGINEERED SYSTEMS LTD. PRODUCT TRACKING AND MANAGEMENT NEWS VOLUME 2, No 1 – Q1/2006
Welcome back to our first 2006 issue of ONTRACK – a newsletter designed to keep our user community in touch with what is happening at QES. We are looking forward to another exciting year at QES, with some challenging implementation projects in the works and lots of plans for further product development. Our mission at QES is to remain at the forefront of our particular areas of expertise and to do that we continually invest in new technology, incorporate new and better techniques into the software and continuously look for ways to bring more value to our clients business. There seems to be no end to the opportunities that we see in our industry for improving the way the pulp and paper business operates. What worked in the 90’s is increasingly seen as not adequate for pulp and paper companies competing in the market places they see today. Our software has evolved continuously since the 90’s to handle the myriad of new challenges facing pulp and paper mills now and the evolution continues unabated. Most of our activities are with companies who need to replace aging IT infrastructure with newer technology that costs less to install, operate and maintain, is easier to modify and customize as well as gives them opportunities to do more with fewer resources. All our newer releases continue our tradition of driving down costs, increasing delivered value and streamlining business processes and we are looking forward to the upcoming installations of our newest releases.
Delivery Problems	Mailing List Blues I must apologize for delivery problems we had in the third and fourth quarters of 2005 that caused a number of our newsletter recipients to be skipped. We had started using a mailing list service from our ISP to facilitate the delivery and it certainly made the delivery task easier. Unfortunately what we did not know until it was too late was that the list service was not delivering the newsletter to everyone on the list. It apparently was randomly skipping large numbers of recipients and it proved impossible to ascertain which ones actually were delivered. This issue is being distributed by a new system that so far seems to have performed flawlessly.
CONTINUED GROWTH BLACKBIRD'S NEWEST INSTALL GOES LIVE!	BLACKBIRD'S 29^th PRODUCTION LINE Last October, 10 pm on October 26^th to be precise, our latest implementation of BLACKBIRD went live at a recycled linerboard mill in the Southwest US. This was BLACKBIRD’S 29^th Production line. The startup went very smoothly and in the first four months of operation, there has been zero lost production attributable to the new BLACKBIRD Q-RTS software running the finishing area. Concurrently, BLACKBIRD Enterprise and X-Trim went live, including at the company’s corporate and sales office in Dallas via a Citrix connection to the mill. Included in the system was Phase 1 of a Raw Materials Management System that will tie in the OCC supply depots around the region. BLACKBIRD will be handling the entire range of business activities from sales through to invoicing and distribution We have just completed a Requirements Definition study for a major producer in the US South. Pending final approval, that project would add the 30^th and 31^st, production lines to our resume. And we are beginning the requirements definition phase for yet another operation which could also proceed this year.
BLACKBIRD 2 Released!!	BLACKBIRD 2 Released We are very excited to have released the latest version of our application suite - BLACKBIRD 2 – in November. Some of the significant changes in this release include full enterprise support for both Oracle and SQL Server, a completely integrated system for planning, scheduling and trimming, and powerful transportation cost management capabilities. In addition we have finished and will be announcing the release of updates of a number of other products. Scheduled for release in the next few months are PTMS 6, qBiz Connector 2, Mapper 2 as well as a brand new product qScale. Contact QES to learn more about these new and exciting products or to schedule a web demo for your site.
BLACKBIRD
Trim Optimization With X-Trim GREYCON	Scheduling and Trimming Many of the paper mills we visit over the course of a year feel that they don’t need the full power of a package like X-Trim. The reasons are varied but most often the comment is made that their requirements are not complex enough to warrant a purchase of a new Trimming Solution. Frequently though, the mills will agree to a study by Greycon where the mill sends a file with a package of orders to be scheduled and trimmed together with the actual trims used when the mill ran that package of orders. Without fail, every time we have set up this exercise, the solutions provided by X-Trim resulted in an improvement in paper machine efficiency, either through reduced waste or overrun, better scheduling or fewer knife changes. And in many cases, the cost reductions are sufficient to pay for the software in a matter of several months.
Quality Management Software	QUALITYCHECK – A Popular Unknown? QualityCheck from QES is perhaps one of the most widely used - yet mostly unknown quality management systems around. Why unknown? Because probably 75% of the licenses sold for the QualityCheck system are sold under a different name by a different company – Lab.21 from Aspen Technologies. Aspen, one of our oldest partners in the industry has been offering the Lab.21 system as part of their IP.21 package for a number of years. It has proven to be a popular addition with copies of Lab.21 going into all sorts of industries, from oil refining in Spain, sugar production in Holland to fish food plants in Chile. QualityCheck is now in Version 6.0 offering many new features, including full browser support.
QualityCheck
WETLAB 5 UPDATE	WetLab Again! People are going to begin to think that your onTRACK editor has Wetlab on the brain as it seems to appear in every issue! But the improvements keep coming and coming. The latest installation of WetLab 5 at a contract pulp testing lab identified a number of high-value improvements to the WetLab software, particularly in the realm of report generation and graphics. With a new graphics tool now being used, the graphics are more flexible, more capable and can produce better reports that will truly reflect the professionalism of the quality practitioners in the pulp industry
WetLab 5
CUSTOMERS IN THE NEWS	PT Kiani Kertas One of our overseas customers, has been in the news a lot lately as it tries to emerge from a troubled period that has forced a lot of downtime on the mill. There are now apparently 2 groups actively looking to purchase Kiani and get the mill running smoothly once again. Your onTRACK editor spent a number of years working for Kiani running its marketing services and distribution department and still has many friends at the mill and in Jakarta. Kiani was one of the first mills to install Version 4 of PTMS and was unique in the use of a direct satellite link to connect the mill in East Kalimantan ( Indonesian part of the island of Borneo) and the corporate office in Jakarta. Kiani was carved out of the jungles of Borneo in the mid 90’s and brought a surge of development to the sparsely populated region where it was built. It continuously struggled with an uncertain wood supply right from start up but the original owners commitment to the mill and to the people of the region ensured that the mill continued to operate and drive development in the region. Now it appears the mill may emerge from its problems and once again be a reliable supplier of market hardwood pulp.
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