Empowering a Paper Manufacturing Giant With Real-Time Data

Challenge: Revolutionize Analytics Capabilities for a Manufacturing Powerhouse

Besides building material and paper goods, paper and pulp manufacturers produce a lot of data. Data that could be used to optimize their processes and improve outcomes. Faced with managing multiple environments, one of the largest manufacturing companies of its kind had reached its limit with open-source tools.

Solution: Unify the Company’s Data Tools to Optimize Production

We provided a licensed, supported solution to resolve the company’s data ingestion and analytics needs. Along with serving multiple data teams, the company’s SAS Viya deployment can predict and protect against manufacturing issues by analyzing facilities data in real-time.

Results: Rapid, Better-Informed Decision-Making Through Data

Implementing an IoT (“Internet of Things”) system, the company deploys predictive maintenance that results in better performance and reduced downtime due to failures. Once hampered by difficult-to-manage technology, the company’s multiple teams now function at a higher level. Responsible for household brands on the shelves of every grocery store, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of pulp, packaging, and building materials has facilities in 180 locations in more than 30 states employing 30,000 people. Yet the company could not meet its data goals. Their data was spread across multiple platforms to handle the ingestion, analytics, processing, and reporting the company needed. The organization supported multiple data teams, and their current solution was not integrated across every group. The company needed a unified, supported solution that delivered real-time processing. They came to Zencos for help.

Implement Multiple Platforms for Data Ingestion and Reporting to Unify Internal Groups

Needing to modernize its data capabilities, the company decided on a SAS Viya deployment for its IoT product set and AI-powered Event Stream Processing (ESP). But a complex deployment lay ahead. The company’s existing open source solution was both difficult to manage and not integrated with SAS. Along with serving multiple functional groups within the company, the new deployment needed to satisfy two analytics groups. One, the Data Analytics team, which works with internal departments to resolve in-house data problems and generate reports. The other, the Data Scientist team, analyzes data from the company’s manufacturing processes by creating and deploying analytics models. SAS Viya needed to bring the organization’s many moving parts together. We got to work.

A High-Performance, Predictive Analytics System with Real-Time Decision-Making

Zencos designed, built, and implemented a complex, multi-tiered IoT analytics deployment across three environments. The new system allows the company to analyze real-time streaming data from multiple manufacturing facilities with Build, Test, and Deploy models that predict points of failure and potential maintenance issues. If one of the company’s machines begins using the wrong chemical makeup during manufacturing, the right team will receive notifications in SAS. With improved analytic responsiveness, teams are now capable of real-time decision-making to improve performance and eliminate inefficiencies. Centralized, smarter access to data frees the company to operate at a higher level. With the expertise of Zencos, one of the world’s largest pulp and paper companies enjoys a product set with advanced analytics capabilities powered by SAS. No matter the size of your organization, we can help you unlock the value of advanced analytics. If this sounds like a system that will bring your business to a new level, let’s talk about it.