Industry: Pulp & Paper | Headquarters: South Africa | Employees: 12,500

Sappi is a global diversified woodfiber company focused on providing dissolving pulp, specialty and packaging papers, printing and writing papers, as well as biomaterials and biochemicals to our direct and indirect customer base across more than 150 countries. The company produces approximately 5.7 million tons of paper per year.

Sappi was incurring quality-related costs due to downtime and equipment damage on its specialty papers lines. Rapid coating build-up during production was causing quality issues (streaks) and an optical machine vision solution was unable to detect the moisture changes in time to take preventive action.

The Eigen team designed a vision solution featuring thermal cameras which could detect the temperature variation that indicated streaks and coating build-up.

Monitors in the factory alert operators when potential issues are detected. Along with using Eigen’s OneView software for real-time monitoring, the production and quality teams have interlocked the solution – automatically unloaded the calendars when significant build-up events are detected.

Real-Time Streak Monitoring

Reduced Downtime

Closed-Loop Automation

Standardized Data & Records

$1M+ Savings Across 3 Factories