China’s largest producer of coated and uncoated white top test liner and world-class preprint home base, Sunshine Paper, has automated its scheduling process for its five cutters by integrating opt-Studio with its SAP ERP solution. The system went live in April 2018.

Shandong Century Sunshine Paper Group Company Limited, founded in 2000, listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange Market in 2007 owning total assets of RMB 10 billion. Sunshine Paper has a total paper capacity of 1.3 million metric tpy, is one of China’s top 15 papermakers and a global top 100 papermaker.

Li Jinhai, CIO, at Sunshine Paper said: "In our endeavours to improve and optimise production processes to mitigate the increased environmental costs due to the new Environmental Protection Tax which has been implemented in China, we approached Greycon which implemented its X-Trim trim optimisation application for us in 2009, to review the planning functionality for our sheeting processes. Following its review, and based on the success of its trim solution X-Trim which they implemented for us in 2009, we requested Greycon integrate its advanced scheduling planning software, opt-Studio, with our ERP to schedule the sheet orders in our five cutters. 

"The adoption of opt-Studio provides us with improved short and mid-term planning capabilities; we can refresh the schedule automatically on every machine in seconds, giving the planner and other users full visibility of the impact of the decisions or external events." 

Tian Jinlong, Business Development Director at Greycon (London, U.K.) said: "Rising environmental costs will intensify the competition in the paper industry and companies are implementing new solutions and upgrading existing products to ensure efficiencies are maximised. Profitable Chinese companies are finding it easier to invest in upgrading however, smaller companies are under more pressure and may even be squeezed out the market. 

"Sunshine Paper approached us with a brief to optimise its planning functionality on its cutters. The integration of opt-Studio enables the optimisation of schedules, improving the production throughput. Since the system manages the scheduling of the orders, the effort of the planners will now be diverted to analysis and optimisation instead of the routine work to feed the orders and their sequence into the ERP-system. opt-Studio will also change decision-making from that of being based on past experience, to fact-based decision-making. The powerful what-if functionality allows the planners to perform different kind of analyses to determine the most efficient way forward.

"The integration was organised using Greycon’s standard methods, Integration Manager and schedule release to Microsoft SQL Server based database table," said Jinlong.