Trip To HPC South

Chris Dixon and I traveled to HPC South last week.  We were educated on their process and what defects can hamper their runnability.  They also where a little more frustrated with how we are running on their machines than what we knew.  They had already rejected 100 tons for July when we visited.  That is by far the most they have rejected for a month.  Their productivity was running at 40% when we left to visit. 

The issues they have had the most problem with where in this order: telescoping/loose winds, snaps, stickies, and edges.   The loose winds have been mostly dealt with.  They still have a few, but we have significantly decreased the problem with us making turn-ups more often, fixing the reel section, and rejecting rolls with gaps using gap testing.  The snaps I believe we can fix with our current work on improving the CD profile.  We have also increased the stretch target from a 6 to an 8.   As they  run the napkin converters, the stretch is pulled out of the sheet.  The more that is in the sheet, the machines more forgiving to defects.  As for the problem with the stickies, they had just started to run the paper we made in April that had stickies.  We will have to be very vigilant on catching any of possible sticky problems, even the very light ones.  Please alert a manager of any issues.  The edge  problems they have issue with are the edges that are formed and when we had some reel section issues.  Several rolls that where made before all of the reel section work where identified as being edge issues.  It was not the edges themselves, but that it was from when the sheet was weaving back and forth as we wound.  It appeared as an edge issue to them.  We have not had this issue as of late since all of the reel section work.  Other edge issues we saw where from trim squirt, blowholes, and bad forming.  We need to watch our formed edge very closely for them.  They get tear outs in the CD direction from these bad edges.  They do not trim the edges.  Our formed edges are comparable with their slit edges that they get coming from the rewinder when we are not having any issues.  We must quickly catch the issues and solve where they are coming from.  Remember we are getting compared to competitors paper that comes off of rewinders.  We need to make sure everything looks as clean as possible.

Some other issues that may affect them are width of the rolls, bad wrinkles, paper weaving, and crushed cores.  If we do not have these taken care of it causes the packing and appearance of the napkin to not look uniform.  They can then have to reject product that looks unevenly folded or packed unevenly.  They call any bad packing appearance like these examples as pack out.  Please be cognoscente of these quality issues and please help the lab technician identify these problems.  I took many pictures and noted my HPC-South experience.  I will be putting  a presentation together of what the converters that run our tissue look like and how they operate.  I will also lay out their needs.  Please keep doing your best to give our customers the highest quality product.

Thanks

Scott