In today’s world of rampant greenwashing, it’s a revelation to come across a company as innovative and forward-thinking as UK-based Mondi Group. As a global leader in packaging and paper, Mondi operates across the entire packaging and paper value chain, from managing sustainable working forests to creating innovative solutions that can be re-used, recycled, or composted.

Based on revenue, over 80% of Mondi solutions are fiber-based, meaning that wood is the primary raw material, sourced from resilient forests with zero deforestation in their supply chain.

As I learned at the recent SAP For Process Industries and Natural Resources Conference, it takes an equally impressive IT strategy (and yes, a small fleet of drones) to ensure Mondi’s sustainable business keeps moving in the right direction.

According to Mondi CIO Rainer Steffl, his company’s IT strategy is built on four pillars: standardization, simplicity, binary (one use case, one solution), and honesty.

Mondi drones

Standardization ensures global factory efficiency by benchmarking processes across factories. Simplicity reduces costs by minimizing applications. Binary avoids redundancy in solutions. Honesty is about being SAP-centric but focusing on business needs.

“We hold a firm belief that if we standardize our factories globally, then we can increase their efficiency and productivity,” said Steffl. “If you visit a Mondi factory in Mexico, Germany or Italy you will find exactly the same processes.”

Simplicity is also a part of Mondi’s DNA.

We believe that if we keep IT simple, IT will be effective and efficient, and if we keep the number of applications low, IT costs will also be low,” said Steffl. “We continuously question ourselves, are we simple enough?”

The third pillar of Mondi’s IT strategy is binary, meaning one use case, one solution.

“By all means we want to avoid one use case with multiple solutions,” said Steffl. “We believe it contradicts standardization and simplicity.”

As for honesty, the fourth pillar of the Mondi IT strategy is making sure the business understands they are an SAP shop, “down to the bone,” according to Steffl. “We want to be simple and standardized.”

The ultimate standardization litmus test arrived with the availability of SAP S/4 HANA, technology that enables businesses to undergo digital transformation. Could Mondi walk the walk and quickly implement SAP S/4 HANA across different regions of the business amidst the Covid lockdown?

“Everybody was sitting in their home office and was locked down globally,” said Steffl. “And this was the real case for us, that the strategy works, or the strategy of the past was executed well enough.”

The standardization strategy paid off as Mondi moved many of its factories to SAP S/4 HANA using an offshore commercial factory in just seven months. Now a factory can go live with an SAP S/4 HANA solution in one day.

“Now the question is, how do we innovate and how do we scale?,” asked Steffl.

Part of the answer lies in inventory optimization, and more specifically, drones to enable a safer and more efficient working environment for Mondi employees.

For more on how top performing Mill Products companies are leveraging technology to drive business innovation, download the Oxford Economics study, "Blueprint for Success: How Mill Products manufacturers can lean into technology to outpace competitors." 

In December 2022, an entity named FocusOnEnergy produced a free guidebook entitled “Energy Best Practices Guide: Pulp and Paper”. Search online for “focusonenergy guidebook pulp & paper” and you can download it. The contributors are veteran paper industry engineers who analyzed energy efficiency throughout mills and identify opportunities for dramatic cost savings.  

In the 4^th industrial era, we can have corporate engineering tap into data at all their mills to identify problems and find opportunities for efficiency. Energy usage and costs can be compared between mills, unit processes, and equipment to isolate trouble spots. It is a very powerful capability that makes data analytics increasingly vital.

Despite these data analytics capabilities, with energy a significant resource and cost in our industry, and the growing movement for sustainability, many mills still operate in a status quo manner. Change can be disruptive and getting production is the primary or only incentive.

There is another challenge to making industry more sustainable. One of the primary authors of the guidebook is Dick Reese, who has a long history in our industry. He has stated that in many cases, flow measurements are way off. He has advocated for interns in mills to check flow measurements with a portable meter. If we cannot trust our measurements, the data analytics will be misleading.  

I have been to a lot of mills where it is obvious the electrical and instrumentation (E&I) are overworked and understaffed. While there are advances in predictive maintenance and maintenance management systems that can better manage these resources, there is still the risk that instrumentation is becoming more critical to operation at a time when we are more uncertain that our instrumentation tells us the truth.

An encouraging sign is that some mills are doing it right. I recently visited an integrated mill that has 17 E&I personnel. That is a good number. I have visited much large mills with a much smaller E&I staff.  

The mills that will survive are those that have instrumentation that can be trusted, data analytics that reveal opportunities, and save lots of money on energy. Other mills are on their way out.

Certainly enjoyed and can identify with Tim Clark's article above about Mondi's implementation of SAP's S/4 Hana Solution. I have been in industry long enough to remember when PLCs were introduced. Before that, it was all relays and limit switches.

Early in my career, I was involved with a new converting process. In this process, all the machinery was custom built to my employer's specifications. We installed eight lines that were supposed to be identical.

Of course, their settings depended on dials, valves and so forth. They were all supposed to be operated exactly alike, every shift of every day.

We couldn't even get one line to operate at the same settings for 24 hours! Each lead person had their own favorite settings. It was impossible to achieve the goal of eight lines running the same settings all the time.

Today, a mere half century later, we have reports such as the Mondi story above. Your challenge today is to keep up with the Mondis of the world. The technology is now available.

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