Mitsubishi Keeps Canadian Box Plant Running

Smurfit-MBI's integrated paperboard box making plant in Whitby, Ontario, was running full speed on a Saturday evening shift. It was business as usual for the 44-year-old plant that is the third-highest producer among the company's dozen locations, issuing a steady stream of corrugated boxes for a wide range of industries.

Plant Manager Ken Gillis (left) shows Maintenance Supervisor Barry Black the location of the replaced control board. The corrugator's old programmable logic controller (top left). Enlarged view of new control board (top right).

Then the unthinkable happened. The Mitsubishi corrugating machine shut down unexpectedly and the plant was silenced.

"If our corrugator doesn't work, our plant doesn't run," says production manager Ken Gills. "This machine runs all day, every day. It can't go down."

Smurfit-MBI people were stunned because the Mitsubishi machine that had been installed in 1980 as the first complete corrugator had been running 24/7 for the last four years, after running around the clock five days a week for the previous 18 years. Maintenance supervisor Barry Black was summoned from his home to solve the shutdown.

"We figured out pretty quickly that the problem wasn't mechanical, but part of the control system, the MELSEC programmable logic controller from Mitsubishi Electric," Black says. It was the wee hours of Sunday morning when Black made his first call to Mitsubishi Corrugating Division in Hunt Valley, Md.

Smurfit-MBI's box plant in Whitby, Ontario is the third-highest producer among the company's dozen locations.

Following a policy that a responsive person will answer every phone call no matter the time of day, Black's call was automatically routed to the home of Mitsubishi parts department's Debbie Ferracci. She soon contacted Customer Service Manager Terry Holtzinger and the race was on to get the Smurfit-MBI plant back online.

"Terry knew how to find Mitsubishi engineers and technicians to help," Black says. "On Sunday morning, they called and tried to talk us through some checks of the PLC and gave us the name and number for Mitsubishi Electric in Chicago. The problem was that people we talked to there had never heard of that model - it was too old. So there were no parts in stock there."

"The first time I talked to Mitsubishi Electric about this, they told me the part number Smurfit-MBI needed did not exist and that it must be obsolete," Holtzinger says. After all, the part was a component of one of Mitsubishi's firstcomplete corrugator control systems that was now in its 22nd year of operation.

The dry end upstream of the Mitsubishi corrugator.

Back in Whitby, Black and others scoured the plant's parts bins for a replacement PLC board. "We had never had a problem with a MELSEC in all these years," Black says. Finally, they found a familiar looking unit under layers of newer parts.

"It wasn't exactly the correct part because we needed the right side memory card and the one we found was for the left side. But with a modification the Mitsubishi engineers talked us through, it did the job," Black says.

The plant was back in action with the modified replacement control board by the following Tuesday morning. "We could have lost a lot more production than we did," Gill says. "As it was, some orders for that period were late and others were kept on schedule because we were able to have others of our plants run some corrugated material for us."

Downstream of the Mitsubishi corrugator.

By that Thursday, the proper replacement part was airlifted from the factory in Japan to Mitsubishi Electric. From Chicago, the part was personally delivered to Smurfit-MBI.

"Everybody at Mitsubishi showed the same sense of urgency that we were experiencing at the plant," Black says.

"We're really happy with the response of everybody at Mitsubishi, from Hunt Valley to Chicago to Japan," Gill says.

Mitsubishi's Holtzinger beamed at the plaudits. "We do this all the time - it's just great to have the glowing feedback," he said.

Mitsubishi's vice president of marketing Randy Schiller underscored the company's "can-do" attitude. "We have never walked away from any machine or controller installed since 1980," Schiller says. "In times when other manufacturers are giving up on 10- or 12-year-old control systems, we extend the life of our machines and cut maintenance costs, sometimes by working with our customers to redesign controller boards."

And that original PLC that finally gave out after 22 years? It was one of the very first MELSEC PLCs, soon to be on display at Mitsubishi Electric headquarters.