Beyond The Box - Box Plant Of The Future

Transcript

Hi. I'm Scott Sauer with International Paper. Welcome to our first episode of Beyond The Box, where we get into what's actually happening with modern manufacturing and what it means for the people running packaging operations every day. When our customers receive an order of boxes, they see the finished product. But what they don't always see is everything happening behind the scenes to make sure those boxes are produced safely, consistently, and delivered when they're needed.

Today, we're pulling back the curtain on a topic that's becoming increasingly important across manufacturing, reliability.

At International Paper, we've been investing in what we call the Box Plant of the Future, combining technology, data, maintenance excellence, and the expertise of our people to create a more reliable manufacturing network for our customers.

Joining me today is Jeremy Fanning, one of the leaders helping drive that effort. Jeremy is widely recognized as one of our go to experts on the Box Plant of the Future, and he's here to help us understand how these investments ultimately benefit the customers we serve every day. Jeremy, welcome to the podcast.

Hey, Scott.

Let... Let's start with a simple question. So if you had to explain Boxplain of the Future to my middle school child, what would you what would you say?

At its core, we are looking at all the technologies that are out there in the market today and and looking at what are the issues that are driving day to day operations in our facilities, and how do we leverage those things to not only improve how our employees operate our facilities and continue to improve what they're doing, but ultimately, how do we bring a better experience to our customers so that we're driving better reliable products and service and so on. Right?

That's awesome. So when I first heard about this initiative a few years ago, I, of course, automatically went to the Jetsons. So I was born in the nineteen hundreds, so I know who the Jetsons are. I'm sure you do too.

So I'm picturing, okay, we're gonna have robots and computers and just all kinds of stuff like that. But that's not really what it is. Right? It's not new equipment.

It's not necessarily George Jetson. Talk to us a little bit about the technology that that you're really speaking about.

Yeah. I mean, new new equipment is certainly part of it. But honestly, it's just a drop in the bucket. We're At IP, we are investing a lot in new tech...

New equipment. And that that certainly is something that that is needed. But when you look at what can take us beyond just the equipment, It's it's having the ability to see into potential problems that are coming up, providing our employees with information and tools that can give them the opportunity to make better decisions on the fly. Right?

Instead of having to react to something, they already have what they need to make those better informed decisions. And at the end of the day, these technologies provide a more, you know, back to what we said earlier, a more reliable outcome for our suppliers or our our customers at the end of the day.

So give me an example of, like, a technology that we are implementing or looking at that is going to benefit our customers.

Yeah. I mean, something simple would be putting sensors on equipment to give us the ability to forecast or predict when a potential failure could occur so that instead of reacting to something, you know, we we talk about fighting fires. It it... And we're not fighting a fire. We are in control of that situation. We are able to take the machine down when we want to instead of it breaking down mid run. Right?

We can minimize the cost of that downtime. And instead of something taking a few hours to fix at the most, we're... Or or instead of something taking many, many hours, we're able to minimize that to maybe even weekend work.

So are these pieces of equipment, like, looking at vibrations? Like, what are they actually doing?

How can we predict when a machine's gonna fail?

Yeah. Exactly. So so vibration and temperature are two key ones because we have so much rotating equipment out in our facilities. That's that's that's how we make our product. And so vibration and temperature is one of those simple ways that you can put that in and get that predictability.

So can you explain the difference? Because I remember when I spent some time in manufacturing, there was preventative maintenance and predictive maintenance. So like, what's the difference there and what's Boxplain of the Future really helping to address?

So when you're preventing something, you are looking into things that, especially like historically, you know something can potentially occur based on what's happened in the past. And so you're you're doing things that you know can help prevent those. But when you're predicting, you have the data and the information that can help you forecast when something can act... Would actually occur. Instead of basing it on history, based on what is expected because the data's telling you there's going to be a problem. If you don't fix it now, it's going to get worse.

So we talked a little bit about vibration sensors and kind of how that helps. Are there any other technologies that we've implemented that would be fun to talk about?

There's plenty of things out there that we either have put in place or are looking at and and trying to prove out today.

I I think one of the...

You know, when we when we talk about things here at IP, safety's always at top of mind. Right? I mean, we we we preach that all the time in all of our facilities. Andy talks about it every time he gets up on stage or gets on gets on a a call.

And so what we're doing is taking cameras that have AI capabilities and we're putting those in places where we can detect in real time potential unsafe conditions. And that gives us the opportunity to then look at that, whatever that situation is, and take action immediately. Right? We can...

Whether it's whether it's letting those people know something's going on or actually going out and making a change on the floor based on what we saw.

So this doesn't mean not having people at box plants. Like, that's that's a misconception.

No. Complete misconception. Yeah.

Okay. Good.

So how does this stuff translate into a better experience for our customers? Like, if if I'm a customer and I'm listening to this podcast, why should I be excited about Box Plant of the Future?

Well, I I... You know, we're we're we're talking about putting technology in that can bring consistency to everything that we do within the plant, which ultimately results in the product and the service we provide to our customers being consistent and reliable.

You know, we're we're having fewer nonconformed products at the end of the day. We're having less delays on orders, and all of that's gonna continue to go down as we continue to invest.

Awesome. So... But we're not just doing this at one plant. Right? Like, we're looking at Box Plant of the Future across the entire network.

Correct. Yes. I mean, our our group's approach that we take to Bpx Plant of the Future as a whole is we're not just throwing stuff into a bunch of plants. Right? We're... We we take a methodical approach to prove the value of something both for the plant and for our customers. And once we've once we've proven out that something makes sense, then we start to scale and make sure we can scale and that we're getting the value that we thought we would.

And that that's where I think the biggest piece of this whole thing is looking at the value in one plant is going to certainly help you. But once you bring that consistency across all your facilities, then no matter where your customers are getting their product, they should be getting the same experience at any point, no matter the situation.

Awesome. So I was at our Lithonia box plant recently taking a tour, and they noticed or they showed me the Clear Vision system that we have there, kind of the the quality system. I was just mind blown by what that thing is doing and just can't believe that that is a real thing. Can you speak to what Clear Vision is?

Yeah. At at a high level, Clear Vision's looking at the product as it goes through our converting equipment, and it is looking for the quality of of how we're producing that product automatically. So instead of having our operators go and do a spot check on everything all the time on every single run, it's it's augmenting that. It's it's adding to by using this this high speed camera to automatically detect the quality of how we're producing that product.

I mean, this thing was taking a picture of every single piece that came out, looking at the flute, the score, the print.

And then when there's a massive... When there's a a defect, it stops the machine and says, hey. Go address this. And Right. I just I just thought that was awesome.

Kinda gets me thinking about AI a little bit. And, you know, I've seen AI absolutely just infiltrate my space in the marketing world. And, you know, it kinda stresses me out. It's also kinda super exciting. What... Is AI playing a role in anything that you're doing?

Oh, there's there's a lot of AI capabilities out there. And and it it is, you know, something that you have to take cautiously, not only because of the possibilities, but also, I mean, we have people that are in our plants day to day that are going to have some hesitancy. And that's natural. Right? I mean, you see it you see it in the world today. There's there's lots of hesitancy around AI. But there's also a lot of power in it.

You know, if if I can give an operator or a mechanic a a way to ask questions about something that's happening in their facility in their natural language. They just they just type it in or speak it, and they don't have to think about how they're saying it or specific things they're saying. They can just say these things and it will... Whether it's troubleshooting a piece of equipment, whether it's trying to remember how to do this process, they can just ask it and it could go out and search all the databases and the documents and everything we have, and it can provide an answer in a flash.

So moving on from kind of the AI side of things, what are some real world examples of how these box plant of the future technologies have made an impact, certainly for our plants, but more importantly for our customers?

Sure.

One of one of the the easy ones, you know, we we talked towards the beginning here about the vibration and temperature sensors and and how that helps us predict failures.

We we had... I mean, I could give you a million examples of this, but we did have one instance where we had a... The system flagged that there was a potential problem coming.

We got out in front of it. We took care of it on a weekend where we were already planning to be down, so didn't take any extra time down for it, didn't spend a bunch of extra money for it, which was perfect.

But had we not had that system, it would have absolutely failed. We we know...

We saw that after the fact. And we didn't have the part on hand. It was going to take at least twenty four or more hours to get there. So that failure with twenty four hours plus all the repair time plus rush shipping the part to get here.

I mean, this was right in the middle of a busy season where there were quite a few rush orders in the middle of everything. And if we can't get our orders out the door, what happens to our customers? They're not happy. Right?

That's...

The whole goal is to get that product to them on time. We would not have done that without catching that.

What... Which of the technologies would you consider like the GOAT? Like, which one are you like, dude? This one's this one's awesome.

Gosh.

That's a tough one because I I think there's so much potential in everything we're doing.

Probably one that that may not be as as obvious to a lot of people, just getting data out of everything that we're doing and putting it somewhere where we can do something with it.

Data is gold. It's it's it's more valuable than gold at this point within the world. And if you have that, you can take action on things that you didn't even know existed before. You can improve upon your processes. You can make better decisions. And if we don't have that data, which which right now it's just kinda sitting out there, we if don't have it, we can't do anything with it. So I think that's that's one that, you know, it's not so so glaringly obvious to a lot of people, but I I think getting that information is gonna be a big one.

So, Jeremy, where where is this going? Like, I know I made a joke about the Jetsons earlier, but, like, is that what's coming or kinda what what should we really expect? I'd I'd like to work for probably twenty more years, and so I just wanted to know, like, it going to look like when I walk in there in twenty years?

Yeah. It's probably going to see maybe not so extreme as the Jetsons, but I think you're going to see a lot of significant improvements in how things how things are operated in our facilities and the results that we give to our customers.

You know, our our our bar for reliability and consistency will keep rising. I mean, our customers are going to continue to raise that bar for us, and we... We're gonna follow suit.

Things that we work on today, those differentiators are just gonna be the norm, right, as we continue to build. And so I think I think probably the bigger things that you're going to see with with all these technologies, we're going to be able to respond faster to demand and changes.

We're going to have better visibility, more visibility.

Our customers are going to have more real time confidence in the things we're doing because we have implemented things that have improved that experience.

And we're going to be more and more consistent across the board as we continue to standardize both with technology and without, you know, across all of our facilities, no matter where the customers are interacting, you're gonna see that same quality, that same dependability across every order, every time.

So I spent fifteen years of my career in communications. Some of that was some crisis response stuff. So whenever I'm with friends, I always can bring up a story or, you know, my job relates to kinda whatever we're talking about. And I'm curious, you probably don't get the chance to to do that.

So I wanna give you the opportunity to just nerd out with an audience that is really interested in what in what we're talking about. So what what are you most excited about? Like, is there a technology that that we've been pitched or that we've seen that you're like, woah. This could really be a game changer.

Like, when you hear that question, like, what kinda comes to mind?

I I think I think it's kind of a a culmination of of multiple things at the same time. You know, we're we've been looking at a lot of things, and not everything is in place yet. We're still trialing a lot of stuff.

But I think it's it's bringing a lot of that together is where the real value is. We're we're not just gonna have bits and pieces here and there, but we're gonna have all that interconnected. We talked about data earlier and how important that is. Getting that data from all of our different areas, whether it's the sensors, whether it's our systems that are already in place, whether it's our people that are capturing information day to day.

But being able to put all that together and use that to...

Then our operators and our mechanics, our supervisors, everyone has that information right in front of them so that wherever they are at any point in time out on the plant floor, they have what they need to do their job well. If they don't have it, if they've got to keep going back to the desk or if they've got to go search a drawer somewhere, if they've to call somebody to ask them a question, that's wasting time.

We can improve that with technology. We can give them, enable them to do this themselves.

And there's so much power in that, and that's what I'm excited about. I wanna see our people be able to take ownership of everything they're doing day to day, and and technology is gonna help drastically change that.

I'll get you out of here on this. If if you could say one thing to our current or future customers about Box Plant of the Future, what would it be?

You know, it's it's real simple, but everything that we're doing comes down to our reliability.

If we aren't reliable to our customers, then we failed.

So, you know, we're not just... We're not putting technology in place just because it's cool or because, you know, it's just good for our employees or it's just good for this or that. Our customers are expecting a lot.

And it's... That's... The whole goal for us is to provide that reliable experience by putting this technology in place. If we have that there, our customers will see something consistent, they'll see something high quality, it will always be on time, and that all culminates with reliability.

Thanks. Jeremy, I just really appreciate you joining us and sharing your thoughts on Box Plant of the Future. I've I've been around you for several years. I know how deeply passionate you really are about this topic and and about providing solutions for our customers.

And it's it's clear that these investments are are really about more than just technology. They're they're about building a safer, smarter, honestly, a more reliable manufacturing network that ultimately helps our customers succeed. If if they succeed, we'll succeed. And I just really appreciate you sharing your knowledge with us today, and hope to have you back some other time.

Absolutely. Thanks, Scott.