KPAQ Industries LLC has installed an ABB, Zurich, Switzerland, Collaborative Production Management (CPM) system at its kraft paper mill in St. Francisville, La., USA. KPAQ’s new CPM system has been integrated to its existing ERP system, various production systems, and accounting systems, allowing it to fully utilize ABB’s cpmPlus solutions for sales/order management, production planning, production management, decision support, and product tracking.

As a result, KPAQ will now be able to streamline its entire operation as all mill functions will be handled in one comprehensive system, allowing a single point of access to all pertinent production data. The system will also be able to efficiently scale to correspond with KPAQ’s production growth and potential expansion.

"We had a highly customized system that did not fit our current work environment. The configurable architecture that ABB provides will allow for all the tools and reporting needed for decision making and efficient action," said Jeff Rake, KPAQ COO.

ABB’s Collaborative Production Management solutions integrate various manufacturing systems, providing real-time visibility, execution, tracking, reporting, and optimizing of manufacturing processes. The ABB Global CPM Product provided to KPAQ has been proven to reduce "order-to-cash" time for customer’s manufacturing operations, improve throughput, reduce inventory, and optimize business processes.

ABB personnel from the U.S., Finland, and the Czech Republic collaborated extensively with the KPAQ project team over the scheduled eight month transition to successfully install the system. 

Information on any technical terms in this article is available online.