Vegas Pays Off

Approximately 430 U.S. corrugated converters and their suppliers, as well as colleagues from as far away as Australia, France, Canada Germany, Mexico, the Phillipines, Russia, Sweden, and Ukraine, convened in Las Vegas last week to develop strategies for improving their business prospects. Best-practice advice from presenters was distributed in session after session on topics covering a broad spectrum, from competing with the Chinese to translating safety into profit. Even the nitty-gritty of ensuring quality throughout the corrugating process by performing ECT checks on in-process board was fair game.

With fall in the air, even in Vegas, football was used as a business allegory by Super Bowl legend Rocky Bleier (read about his talk at http://paperboardgroup.blogspot.com/), who was recruited to make the case for being the best at executing all these strategies.

Could China Help Us?—Depending on your outlook, competition from China could turn out to be either the worst thing that ever happened to U.S. converters or the best. China has some of the world’s most modern and efficient box factories. And since 2000, production of corrugated packaging in China has risen 16 percent compared to less than three percent in the U.S. and less than two percent in Europe, Richard Pratt, chairman of Melbourne, Australia-based Visy Industries, said in his opening-day TAPPI keynote session.

Within 10 years, he predicted, China will be capable of matching or beating the world’s best practices in paper making and converting equipment. Chinese paper makers will be capable of exporting high-quality paper and packaging to the West.

He explained that while all of this news about China isn’t good in itself, if U.S. converters respond, the results could be. In fact they may give new life to their industry.
“Innovation and customer service will increasingly be the only things that can differentiate the winners in our industry for the future,” Pratt says. “For example, right now at Visy we’re working with an architect on developing some innovative building panels using a sort of plywood, corrugated board sandwich. It has application as low-cost housing and may even have a use in providing quick but comfortable shelter for victims of disasters like Katrina.”

Pratt identified several other developments that will help
converters break away from the industry’s doldrums.

•Lighter-weight, better-performing, better-printing paper grades with functional coatings that deliver results at lower cost;
•The ability to produce microflutes that act as both the
primary and secondary pack;
•The incorporation of RFID tagging into packaging;
•Short-run customized digital printing services;
•Bag-in-box systems;
•Plastic and paper combinations;
•Timber and paper combinations for pallets;
•Biodegradable plastics in boxes;
•Shorter box production runs;
•Higher-quality graphics;
•Shelf-ready and display-ready designs;
•Contract packing;
•Litho laminates; and
•Supply chain management services.

“In short, we must get more involved in our customers’ businesses than we ever have before,” Pratt states. “One potential growth area for corrugated companies is the provision of automated packaging systems that help make our customers’ production lines more efficient.”

Indeed, while Pratt was speaking at TAPPI, his company’s automation division was exhibiting some of its solutions at the Pack Expo show, also in Las Vegas. The purpose was to test the American market for the company’s palletizing robots, carton erectors and tray formers.

“We haven’t moved nearly as quickly as say the car industry, the computer industry or the airline industry when you compare what we do today with what we did 50 years ago,” he says. “If we’re going to remain relevant over the next 50 years we have to keep spending on capital to ensure we have the lowest cost of production. But it will be innovation and service that win out in the end. We have to stand out from the competition. The future for those who do is very bright indeed.”

Safety First—To get the most out of the innovation coming from inside and outside the plant, it has to be grounded in a culture of safety. Several integrated converters explained how they grew that culture over the last few years in an atmosphere that was conducive to bottom-up buy-in from their organizations. Of course, a little guidance from OSHA can offer companies a good incentive to be safe.
Frank Barzen, a safety and health trainer employed by the state of Nevada, put his advice in the form of a list comprising the “Fatal Five” obstacles to safety and productivity in box making:

•Failure to stop equipment;
•Failure to disconnect;
•Failure to dissipate residual energy;
•Gravity; and
•Failure to clear the work area.

Any program designed to fight these issues must have certain characteristics to be effective.

It must be in writing, all authorized employees must be trained, and the program must be audited annually. Failure to do these things could be a violation of OSHA’s general duty clause and the consequences of that depend on the consequences of the violation.
“Serious violations are where someone is hurt or killed,” he explains. “Willful is where issues like lockout/tagout or machine guarding are ignored and someone is hurt or killed. The penalties for that start at $70,000 for each case.”

Jeff Pallini, vice president and general manager of Fosber America, Green Bay, Wis., paid an even heftier penalty for ignoring lockout/tagout. It cost him much of his right hand. At the time of the accident he was working in the tissue converting industry. On April 25, 1985, thanks to a machine not being locked out while he was somewhere he shouldn’t have been, he carries a lifelong reminder.

“Safety needs to be your personal responsibility,” he testified. “Unless every individual makes it their priority, people are never really safe.”

In the U.S., OSHA 29 CFR 1910.147, the control of hazardous energy, covers lockout/tagout standards. Per 1960.31B, an OSHA inspector can enter your facility at any time. Someone registering a complaint usually spurs inspections. Although penalties are usually financial, the inspector also has authority to shut down a machine, said Bob Allen, Alliance Machine Systems Inc., Spokane, Wash.

“Last year there were a total of 41 citations from 14 inspections for a total penalty of $156,000 in our industry,” he notes.

Sometimes, no matter how good your intentions, a simple miscommunication can cause safety problems, added Frank Cordier, corporate manager for safety and health, Smurfit-Stone Container Corp., Chicago.

“When we worked with OSHA on lockout/tagout citations, it was our own terminology that was leading the inspector astray,” he says. “When he asked an operator what he did in case of a jam the operator would say we lock the machine out. He showed the inspector the nearest control button. That caused a problem because you can’t use control power to effect a lockout tagout.”

Through further industry consultation, an exception in the lockout/tagout procedure was crafted and labeled 1910.147. This “energy-safe procedure,” as it is called at Smurfit-Stone, allows a certain level of power to flow for tasks where control power is necessary, such as clearing jams, minor cleaning, some lubrication, some adjustments, and some setup processes.

“We had to demonstrate our energy-safe procedures provided adequate protection to the employee,” he says.

Smurfit-Stone rewired all of its equipment to allow for key switches, enabling operators to clear a jam by going to the nearest control switch, turning it off, and putting the key in their pocket. That ensures equipment can’t be activated by anyone else.

At Smurfit-MBI, Mississauga, Ontario, machine safety starts with management commitment and a documented safety philosophy. The company regularly issues safety alerts via email to all plants. “We’ve had stand down meetings where we shut down entire plants for a day to talk about safety,” says Antony Orchard, director of manufacturing. “That’s a huge commitment in cost, but it’s had a major effect.”

The penalty for not committing to safety can be death. In 2000, one Weyerhaeuser facility paid that price in a fatality associated with equipment grounding. After researching remedies, the company started adding redundant circuits to 4,000 of its machines. An electronic relay ensures that a circuit has been disabled and a green beacon confirms it for the operator.

“If you make this difficult for operators, they might shortcut the system,” explains William Lewis, Weyerhaeuser’s director of manufacturing strategies. “Today, if we had to take someone off the street and run them through the processes, with the documentation we have at each machine center, they could safely lockout the machine center.”

This wasn’t an inexpensive proposition. On the hardware side alone Weyerhaeuser has spent more than $10 million in the last two years. The software side was even more expensive, involving the rewrite of procedures and retraining all the employees. Weyerhaeuser considers this money well spent.

Fight the Crush—The corrugated sheet produced in a box plant also must be protected if that plant is going to ensure customer satisfaction. One of the most common causes of defective corrugated sheets is damage at various points throughout manufacturing. Edge Crush Testing (ECT), executed at those points, can be an effective means of quality assurance.

“To maintain box compression strength we must maintain ECT strength through the process so the maximum potential we can get off the corrugator remains the box we made as it leaves our shops,” says Benjamin Frank, manager, materials optimization and development for Packaging Corp. of America. “The more times you touch the combined board, the more opportunities you have to make the ECT value go down.

“Measuring ECT at different process points in your box plant can identify key areas for board damage and key areas for improvement. It allows benchmarking and it identifies areas for operational improvement.”OBM