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Writer for Nip Impressions
Thursday, July 10, 2025 1:45 pm
While many paper and paperboard products are used to package food, pharmaceuticals, and cosmetics (all products either ingested or applied to living beings), I seldom see GMP, or cGMP applied to their manufacture. I once worked at a facility where when we made a certain poor-quality board, we actually sold it to a local pizza chain for boxes that directly touched the product! Why? Because it wouldn't pass the test for a major food company. If you are not familiar with GMP or cGMP, these are widely adopted standards originally developed by the bakery industry. They have been adopted and formalized by the FDA and the World Health Organization.
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Thursday, July 3, 2025 1:45 pm
If one could put housekeeping in a pipe and pump it around the mill in circles, not only would it be assigned an operating budget, but it would also be assigned a maintenance budget, too. As it is, housekeeping gets even less respect than maintenance--at least maintenance has a line item in the budget. I am going to go way out on a limb here...
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Thursday, June 26, 2025 1:45 pm
If you hang around me more than five minutes, you will likely hear me say "spin the invoice printer." Or the invoice printer is the most important machine in any business, government or charity. I say it because it is true. If you cannot produce an invoice demanding payment in exchange for goods or services, you don't have a business. The only other choice is to use a gun, but society tends to frown on collections accomplished at the point of a gun. The hard to execute part is doing those things necessary and in the precise order to deserve the honor of producing an invoice.
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Thursday, June 19, 2025 1:45 pm
When we talk safety, we often go immediately to an industrial setting. Well, industrial settings like offices, have their own safety hazards. Personnel in offices are usually not wearing Personal Protective Equipment (PPE), either.
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Thursday, June 5, 2025 1:45 pm
I want to impress upon you the need to know how your PPE works and to wear it all the time. I want to impress upon you to look out for your colleagues and make sure they are wearing their PPE all the time.
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Thursday, June 5, 2025 1:45 pm
There are many emotions that don't mix with safety, anger is one of the most dangerous. As I recently read, Anger is one letter short of Danger.
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Thursday, May 29, 2025 1:45 pm
Safety is not something that can be compartmentalized. Break your arm on a jet ski on Saturday, and I will guarantee you it will still be broke the next Monday. Your safety awareness has to be constant awareness.
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Thursday, May 22, 2025 1:45 pm
Otherwise known as walking or running, perhaps bicycling. Lieutenant Dan to Forrest Gump and Bubba, "Take care of your feet and try not to do anything stupid! Always change your socks!" If this goes in the swamps of Vietnam, it goes doubly in pulp and paper mills.
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Thursday, May 15, 2025 1:45 pm
Paper Mills require a lot of vertical transportation. The first clue is to encounter a building where the "basement" is at ground level! If the "basement" is at the ground level, it is obviously only up from there. Elevators, ladders, cranes, stairs are all vertical transportation devices laden with hazards.
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Thursday, May 8, 2025 1:45 pm
Last week, we talked about the costs in transportation. There are technology advances on the horizon which should help with this.
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Thursday, May 1, 2025 1:45 pm
The US interstate highway system is sixty-nine years old this coming June 29th. In many ways, this has been the most transformative change in the United States culture ever. Heck, I was even inspired to solo drive the 48 contiguous states in less than seven days, which I did in 2005. Small, local businesses and manufacturers were motivated to build larger factories to capitalize on the scale afforded by this highway system. We did so in the pulp and paper industry, at the cost or savings (depending on your point of view) of thousands of jobs.
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Thursday, April 24, 2025 1:45 pm
Many years ago, I conducted a seminar on public relations as it deals with the pulp and paper industry's interactions with its local communities. In attendance was a young engineer whose job, among other duties, was to handle the calls from the nearby communities concerning smells and so forth. I asked him what his answer was when he received a call about smells. He said most of those complaints could be tracked to the non-condensable gases coming from the pulp mill and recovery boiler area. I then asked, what do you tell them?
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Thursday, April 17, 2025 1:45 pm
Many years ago, I attended a seminar whose speaker was the CEO of a paper company in a distant land. He spent about an hour telling us how his company exceeded their local environmental regulations by a factor of two or three. My thought was--why?
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Thursday, April 10, 2025 1:45 pm
On a trip to the Helsinki office of Jaakko Pöyry in 1989, Jaakko Pöyry (the man) grabbed me in the hall one day and we went to the auditorium. He had a tape in his hands and gave it to the projectionist. "Jim, I want you to see this." It was a news tape from Australia chronicling a large protest taking place in Tasmania over the prospects of a new pulp mill being built there. Both of us were left speechless, we had never seen anything like this before.
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Thursday, April 3, 2025 1:45 pm
With a new administration in the US White House, where do environmental issues stand today? Notably, the United States has withdrawn from and ceased funding of the Paris Agreement. Many other deregulation initiatives are under way. So, what does that mean for the pulp and paper industry?
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Thursday, March 27, 2025 1:45 pm
We started out this month admonishing procurement professionals to be honest in their dealings and we will end on the same note. The three departments most likely to become involved in corruption in a mill are procurement, engineering and maintenance. In these modern days, the IT department has become a new, susceptible entity as well.
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Thursday, March 20, 2025 1:45 pm
Eh, maybe not. Unless you are buying a lock washer like I mentioned last week. Lock washers should be in your automatic ordering system and never show up as a human decision once reorder quantities are established. For the bigger stuff (say $500,000 and up), go reasonably slow. Use AI to gain knowledge, but don't use it to go quicker.
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Thursday, March 13, 2025 1:45 pm
If you have bought anything larger than a lock washer, you've seen the documents. In paper form, reams and reams of paper describing every last thing possible in a purchase contract. In my fifty-five years in industry, I can't think of anything that has grown faster than the purchase "agreement." Yet, today, a significant portion of my income is from efforts as an "expert witness" in contract arguments. Something is amiss here. How did this happen?
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Thursday, March 6, 2025 1:45 pm
For years I have said if you have an energy asset, keep it for the political world of what is in favor in energy constantly changes. The same flexibility is needed in purchasing.
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Thursday, February 27, 2025 1:45 pm
Procurement is an area often talked about with a "wink-wink" and a "nod-nod."
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Thursday, February 20, 2025 1:45 pm
Sorry, I can tell you a time not to innovate. It is when you are tempted to play with the financial books. This never turns out well.
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Thursday, February 13, 2025 1:45 pm
Sometimes you can make innovation work by looking at other ideas far out of your field. Here is an example...
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Thursday, February 6, 2025 1:45 pm
One of the worst statements I have ever heard is, "We have already tried that before." Give it its due, though, it is right out there to hit you in the face. More subtle and more dangerous is "innovation optimism." When you think of an idea, it is formed perfectly in your brain. It has no flaws in its execution, it runs forever on zero energy, and it cost nothing.
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Thursday, January 30, 2025 1:45 pm
Want to innovate? Make sure you have a really good idea and make sure you have a way to protect it.
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Thursday, January 23, 2025 1:45 pm
And likely don't budget for either. It is a long list...
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Thursday, January 16, 2025 1:45 pm
Maybe I am just catching up, but YouTube is a great resource for instructional videos in the paper mill, particularly for maintenance. Look up "installing a paper machine doctor blade" and you will find many videos. Same for "rewinding an electric motor" or "rebuilding a gate valve." You name it and there is likely multiple videos on how to do most any maintenance task.
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Thursday, January 9, 2025 1:45 pm
If you have read me for any length of time, you know I despise the maintenance budget slashers. They have this idea that if the cut the maintenance budget, profit will rise and so will their bonuses. Ask them if they miss the scheduled maintenance schedule on their BMWs. If they have a heart and common sense, there may be a better way to convince them that appropriate maintenance expenditures are desired and lead to more profits. How?
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Thursday, January 2, 2025 1:45 pm
This is maintenance month, and I thought I would start off talking about the kinds of people that make ideal maintenance employees, from managers to the lowliest newbies. This will not completely fix maintenance problems, for idiots higher up in the organization can withhold vital maintenance dollars to protect their bonuses, but if you can get by them, this is a good place to start.
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Thursday, December 26, 2024 1:45 pm
The best are like the one I talked about a few weeks ago. The worst are ones who participate in workplace gossip. The second worse ones seek recognition for themselves or their department. I think the most important attribute is to understand people and particularly to be able to tell when people are telling you the truth (or not).
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Thursday, December 19, 2024 1:45 pm
When I was a little boy and dad came home from work talking about firing someone, I took it literally and was alarmed. His further explanation to clarify the firing comment was not of help. "What do you mean, you canned them?" Being burned or put in a can did not seem to be very humane to an eight-year-old. When it comes to your career, though, such actions are equivalent to the literal.
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Thursday, December 12, 2024 1:45 pm
I was charged with building a professional office of one hundred plus people in the late 1980's. My boss and my intent was to do it quickly with the best we could find. Our starting point was less than half dozen long-term employees. I knew we were going to rock their world as we went from a small office to a moderately sized operation. The first person I hired was the human resources manager.
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Thursday, December 5, 2024 1:45 pm
DEI has become so ubiquitous in the last couple of years that it probably needs no definition. But just in case, it stands for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. If it is not dead, to follow the old joke, it is at least on life support.
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Thursday, November 28, 2024 1:45 pm
The Human Resources Department serves in a defensive role in most companies. Its purpose is to keep the company from being sued and to tamp down disturbances amongst the employees. At least that is the way I see it. But read on, there is a bit more.
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Thursday, November 21, 2024 1:45 pm
The title of this column is playing out right now in the packaging segment. Lightweight recyclable packaging is winning out over traditional packaging--and this is being accepted in the markets as an improvement in quality. This column is something of a continuation from last week with a slightly different slant.
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Thursday, November 14, 2024 1:45 pm
Or, in other words, would significantly improved quality make for higher profit margins in the pulp and paper industry? Can we make a paper company into the equivalent of Christian Dior or Estee Lauder through quality improvements?
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Thursday, November 7, 2024 1:45 pm
When many think of quality, their mind immediately goes to specifications. Is the moisture correct? How about smoothness? Coating quality? Pin holes? These matters are all important, but even more important is the integrity of the deal.
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Thursday, October 31, 2024 1:45 pm
Sometimes quality can be better than necessary.
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Thursday, October 24, 2024 4:00 pm
Every manufacturing facility I have ever known has energy in the tare. What is tare? Pallets, drums, totes, tires, empty trucks and so forth. Pallets, drums, totes, and (used) tires (P,D,T &T) are considered a nuisance. Empty trucks may be another matter.
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Thursday, October 17, 2024 4:00 pm
I predict our grandchildren will be thriving on nuclear energy and using our then obsolete windmills as amusement park rides.
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Thursday, October 10, 2024 4:00 pm
When I look back on what has happened in my lifetime, both at work and at home, I see ever increasing energy uses, some of which may not be smart. Computers and the Internet, and all the ancillary issues that go with these (cloud computing, server farms and so forth), are the big hidden users that did not exist when I started working in 1970. When I started working in 1970, there was not a desktop calculator, let alone a computer, in the entire company. There was one pitiful copying machine that could copy one page at a time. Faxes had not been invented or at least were not widespread. This was a company that fabricated steel products--the biggest user of electricity was arc welders. OSHA was a new idea and had not promulgated any regulations.
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Thursday, October 3, 2024 1:00 pm
I think the answer to the title question would have been "certainly" a couple of years ago. It does not seem to be so solid now. And, of course, it depends on what types of electric vehicles we are talking about. Electric fork or clamp trucks seem to be a certainty. Over the road vehicles (automobiles, trucks) may need a qualifier based on use.
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Thursday, September 26, 2024 1:00 pm
The last phase in our capital project is ramp up. We already covered this for tissue last week. Ramp up is never over. Don't put an end date on it.
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Thursday, September 19, 2024 1:00 pm
Last week, we talked about planning. I am just moving on down the schedule this week to "Check Out and Commissioning." The potential for screwups here is as great as in planning. Bring in a fresh OCD person to manage these functions.
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Thursday, September 12, 2024 1:00 pm
It helps to have OCD (Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder) in order to plan a capital project, even a small one. Or as the joke says, OCD should be CDO, so the words are in the correct alphabetical order. I can tell you this--if you don't have a touch of OCD, you will never be a successful capital project manager.
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Thursday, September 5, 2024 1:00 pm
This week, I want to talk about buying equipment and services. The first thing I want to talk about is keeping your relationship with the sellers at arm's length.
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Thursday, August 29, 2024 1:00 pm
The answer likely lies with a definition of your role in the company. If you are a typical project engineer within a mill, it likely starts when you are given a request from an operating department. Listen carefully to them, they are your customer. Yet bring your own professionalism to the party, too. This means don't listen to them wide eyed and gap jawed as if they have all the answers.
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Thursday, August 22, 2024 1:00 pm
By Fos, the Rat: Well, I can't believe it, but another month of Pulp Rats is almost over. It has seemed extra short this year, perhaps because there are only four columns, not five as there are some years. I would like to wrap up talking about Force Majeure.
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Thursday, August 15, 2024 1:00 pm
By Fos, the Rat: Jim was telling me a story I could hardly believe. Let's have him tell it this week. Take it away, Jim.
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Thursday, August 8, 2024 1:00 pm
By Fos, the Rat: I thought this week I would walk out on the Annual Pulp Rat Convention floor and talk to some who are not being heard by the Great Council.
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Thursday, August 1, 2024 1:00 pm
By Fos, the Rat: Once again, I am interviewing Mr. Jim at the Pulp Rats' Convention. This year the convention is being held in the deep south.
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Thursday, July 25, 2024 1:00 pm
It starts when you get out of bed in the morning. Do you make your bed or not? Depends on your personal standards. Likewise, how you keep your work area, how you keep your automobile, whether you steal from others or lie, whether you put tools back where you found them or in a better place, these are your standards. So don't say there are no standards--you started having standards before you went to school.
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Thursday, July 18, 2024 1:00 pm
We've talked about policy and regulations for three weeks, let's finish out the month with two columns on standards. Standards are so ubiquitous; we don't even notice them.
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Thursday, July 11, 2024 1:00 pm
There are many regulations we encounter in our work life that are good. There are others that seem to be a power kick for the regulators. Here is one I would have us adopt a papermakers if I were King.
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Thursday, July 4, 2024 1:00 pm
The last week of June this year may be the most important week in regulations and general policy in the last century.
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Thursday, June 27, 2024 1:00 pm
If you have not heard of EUDR by now, surely others in your company have. This is the European Commission Regulation on Deforestation-free products. Subtitle: EU rules to guarantee that the products EU citizens consume do not contribute to deforestation or forest degradation worldwide. The operative word here is "worldwide." Thus, no matter where you make your forest products, if you want to sell it in the EU, you must comply.
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Thursday, June 20, 2024 1:00 pm
Quick--what is your image of your purchasing team? I'll bet it is them sitting in their offices with their nose stuck in a computer or a document. Or perhaps on the phone. Back in the days when I worked in a mill, I spent a good deal of time wandering around the mill. It didn't make any difference what my job was, I wandered around the mill in order to understand it from a detailed and overarching perspective. This made me better at my job, whether it be engineering, maintenance, technical, power house manager, whatever.
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Thursday, June 13, 2024 1:00 pm
Forty years ago, I was up to my eyeballs in a major rebuild of the paper machine where I worked. One day, a couple of months before the actual commencement of the shutdown for the rebuild, I got a call in my office. It was a truck driver that was in the administration building. He had walked there from where he left his truck, about two miles down the road (no cell phones in those days). I went out to see what I could do for him. He took me to his truck. It was barely off the two-lane highway. One set of the trailer's rear axle tires were gone, and the wheel hubs were worn down to the axle. We are talking about two axles.
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Thursday, June 6, 2024 1:00 pm
These days it often takes a deep dive to understand honest and ethical, the first two attributes I mentioned last week. When it comes to honesty, you can't be selective. You are either honest or you are not--throughout all aspects of your life. Hence, purchasing managers, especially, need to be honest throughout all aspects of their life.
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Thursday, May 30, 2024 1:00 pm
This is simple and in this order...
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Thursday, May 23, 2024 1:00 pm
Over fifty years ago, when I first entered the pulp and paper industry, the first energy crisis was underway. As a young person early in my career, I and others in my peer group thought this was new, exciting and solvable. Fifty years later, it is old, boring and never ending. So, let's end this month's energy trends' columns with three truths.
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Thursday, May 16, 2024 1:00 pm
Worldwide, the overall energy policy in place is derived from ideas one hundred years or more old. For the last century, all we have been doing is putting band aides on this, leaving us with a mishmash of regulations that do nothing to make a consistent, effective policy. We will just focus on highway transportation here and ponder a bit how a sane policy in this corner of the energy world would have a profound impact on energy usage everywhere, even inside our mills.
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Thursday, May 9, 2024 1:00 pm
When I was a teenager on the farm in southern Ohio, the electric line came across the pasture to our home. It was about 1/3 of a mile from our house to the road where the main electric line was and is. I have an aerial shot of our homestead hanging in my office which was taken about 1970. In it, one can clearly see the electric pole near our house with the bright gray, almost white, transformer near its top. Let me tell you about this transformer...
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Thursday, May 2, 2024 1:00 pm
"The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power" by Daniel Yergin is the definitive book on the history of oil up until the current energy craziness we have been experiencing for the last fifteen years or so. It is also a great documentary available for free on YouTube. I highly recommend the documentary. Unfortunately, "The Prize" stops where modern energy follies start.
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Thursday, April 25, 2024 1:00 pm
This is exactly the same column I delivered up to you for the last week in March. At that time, I was talking about housekeeping and how it relates to maintenance. Housekeeping is strongly tied into safety, too. Read it again, please. This is the column I promised you last week. Your reaction will be either scoffing at it or believing it--there will be no middle of the road reactions. If you decide to believe, contact me and I will help you, at no charge, to get started.
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Thursday, April 18, 2024 1:00 pm
The US and European pulp and paper industries are in the throes of two distinct and separate mergers (or takeovers, if you prefer). One is being driven from Europe, the other from the United States. Despite noble efforts from the respective executive suites some employees will be upset. This has happened in similar situations before.
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Thursday, April 11, 2024 1:00 pm
In most jurisdictions, it is illegal to hold a cell phone while driving a car. Yet in most paper mills, one does not see this sort of restriction, indeed, anything close to it. Should we have similar restrictions in mills? I think so...there is almost no place in a pulp and paper mill where a phone is appropriate.
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Thursday, April 4, 2024 1:00 pm
I must admit I did this back in the day, and I recently heard this practice still happens. Hourly workers are usually protected from this, with or without unions, so it is a practice where one needs to focus on the management ranks. I am talking about ridiculously long working periods.
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Thursday, March 28, 2024 1:00 pm
Observing mill engineering departments for a few decades, I've noticed a haphazard application of well known nationally and internationally recognized standards in small, mill originated upgrade projects. I'll even admit that, decades ago, I likely participated in this negligence. Standards are created for a reason.
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Thursday, March 21, 2024 1:00 pm
This is the column I promised you last week. Your reaction will be either scoffing at it or believing it--there will be no middle of the road reactions. If you decide to believe, contact me and I will help you, at no charge, to get started.
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Thursday, March 14, 2024 1:00 pm
I don't think I have ever been around more depressing pulp and paper mills than those experiencing poor maintenance. The only thing that can drive morale down faster is producing a product in a declining market (anyone remember newsprint?). Sadly, many senior managers view maintenance as a cost.
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Thursday, March 7, 2024 1:00 pm
Sometimes I think maintenance suffers from "macho disease." We talk about changing out press rolls, monitoring machine bearings and other sorts of "big deal" maintenance projects. I would hate to think how many times I have been exposed to pump and motor alignment. Yes, it is an important subject, but it is not everything. There are other things that can shut you down, too (or at least cause you to lie).
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Thursday, February 29, 2024 1:00 pm
It is my favorite month because maintenance can pay huge dividends. Or maintenance can kill you if you ignore it. I've told many mill related tales of maintenance in this column over the years. For some reason, when I started to think about maintenance for this year's column series, I went back to my youth and some maintenance disasters that took place when I was a teenager at home.
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Thursday, February 22, 2024 1:00 pm
We have spent the last three weeks talking about transportation issues and challenges in the pulp and paper industry today. About a year ago, I had an epiphany in the transportation and warehousing area. I went out and got a "patent pending" status on it. Due to all my other activities, I only feebly marketed it. At the time, my idea was to sell the idea. In the meantime, I have now decided to present it here for you to ponder.
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Thursday, February 15, 2024 1:00 pm
Jerry Seinfeld has an old joke that goes like this. He is out driving in a rural area. He passes a log truck. Then he meets a log truck coming towards him. He asks, "If the people over here need logs and the people over there have logs, couldn't they just call each other up and avoid driving these logs all over the place?" It got a big laugh. Of course, real life is not this simple.
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Thursday, February 8, 2024 1:00 pm
To borrow from last week, I don't care if it is the bar of soap going down the conveyor or the shipment of pulp from Brazil, the costs in transportation is the onloading and the offloading. These termination points are also the points most susceptible to mishandling and accidents. Granted the load must be secured appropriately, depending on the application, but you'll find the problems and the costs are at the ends.
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Thursday, February 1, 2024 1:00 pm
It is transportation month here at Nip Impressions, and there is a lot to talk about. I almost titled this first column of the month "Transportation Follies" but then thought better of it. There certainly are many transportation follies in the headlines these days. However, I thought I would spend this first column of the month in a cerebral fashion. What do you think of when you think about transportation?
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Thursday, January 25, 2024 1:00 pm
I promised you this column last week. Everyone in a capital project is under pressure. The mill team is under pressure to bring the project in on budget (remember how you kept shaving the budget to get the project through the board of directors?). The suppliers are under pressure to win the project at the highest possible profit for them, and will promise the moon, if they don't have to put it in writing. And this is all good, for it gives an old guy like me a steady income as an expert witness in project lawsuits. The grayer and thinner my hair has gotten, the more I can charge.
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Thursday, January 18, 2024 1:00 pm
I have served as an expert witness in several capital project cases (dare I say disasters?). How do projects end up in this condition (disasters)? There only seem to be two major causes of such fates. The first is believing in magic and the second is dishonest dealings. We'll cover magic this week.
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Thursday, January 11, 2024 1:00 pm
There have been several capital decisions in recent years that have left me scratching my head. In these cases, a great deal of funds have been expended to clean out old paper machine halls for the express purpose of installing new machines of a different grade.
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Thursday, January 4, 2024 1:00 pm
Back when I started in the industry, one bought everything for their new machine, printing press, or flexofolder/gluer piecemeal. Yes, there was a primary machinery supplier, but the capital project team and the project engineers bought everything else separately and integrated it all into one concomitant system. Due to growth of the industry, project teams became less experienced, and the system fell apart. Startup dates and startup curves were missed because of missing but vital components. Major machine suppliers had ready excuses for not meeting performance guarantees and there was a lot of finger pointing.
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Thursday, December 28, 2023 1:00 pm
I am speaking about the capital projects sector for 2024 and going forward a bit.
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Thursday, December 21, 2023 1:00 pm
I am sure you have heard the story many times about how I lost all steam producing capability in a northeastern Ohio mill in the winter of 1987. It was early February and temperatures had plunged to -20 F. I was not at the mill at the time, but no difference, both the powerhouse and the maintenance departments reported to me...
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Thursday, December 14, 2023 1:00 pm
As you have probably noticed by now, I have taken a bit of a cynical view in this power and energy month here at Nip Impressions. I tend to do this when secular subjects become so widespread and accepted as the whole truth, all other theories be damned. Experience and logic tell me that such widespread, cult like belief must have a few cracks somewhere and those cracks must be explored. Thus, I will continue down this path this week and next.
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Thursday, December 7, 2023 1:00 pm
The Cop28 Climate Change Conference currently underway in Dubai seems to have hit a couple of speed bumps on the way to banning fossil fuels.
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Thursday, November 30, 2023 1:00 pm
There are a group of Mennonites in southern Ohio I love dearly. I try to go visit them a couple of times a year for a few days. My next visit is planned for the weekend of 16 - 17 Dec 2023. When I get there, my phone goes off and into my bag. There is no electricity. Heat is wood. Farming and local transportation is done with horses. They do use the bus system for long-distance traveling, and they do this quite often. Sounds inconvenient? It is the price of freedom.
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Thursday, November 23, 2023 1:00 pm
The question for you, dear reader and marketer, is what are we missing? Our typical product cycle is to try out a feature or a concept and gauge the reaction. Then it lives or dies. But let's turn this around. You may know better than we do what the next innovation in digital marketing to the pulp and paper industry should be. Sometimes one can be so close to something that they miss the obvious. We want to make sure that is not happening to us. Hence we want to hear from you.
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Thursday, November 16, 2023 1:00 pm
Often, the barriers to innovation boil down to an unwillingness to take risks. If those risks involve technological changes, that just adds to the resistance. In the last thirty years, communications, for instance, have gone through startling changes, more changes than had been seen by humankind from the first written and spoken words up until then. These changes profoundly affected the pulp and paper industry and have blown by as if we were sitting still.
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Thursday, November 9, 2023 1:00 pm
One of the major barriers to process innovation is knowing too much about the subject. Knowledge of a subject sets up unconscious barriers to innovation. Think of learning to drive an automobile. I have taught three teenagers how to drive. In all three cases, their first time behind the wheel experience resulted in eyes darting about rapidly. As they became familiar with driving, the eye darting subsided because they learned what was important and dismissed everything else. Same is true of a process or procedure. If you know it with your eyes closed, so to speak, you are dismissing a great deal of information that might be helpful in innovation. It's the "we've never done it that way syndrome." There are a couple of ways to shortcut this.
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Thursday, November 2, 2023 1:00 pm
A couple of seemingly disparate items strike me as we start to think about innovation and strategy this month. The first is the press release a couple of months ago announcing the coming departure of the chairman of a major pulp and paper company. Reading between the lines, one could infer that this chairman and the board are out of ideas as to how to take the company forward. The other is the current popular human resource acronym, DEI, which stands for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion. As with most such acronyms, this one is too simplistic and is itself too inclusive, likely being applied where it is not appropriate.
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Thursday, October 26, 2023 1:00 pm
At their best, all the sensors, software and specifications you have pertaining to quality are merely aids to your personnel as they produced quality services and goods at your company. This is true for even the most sophisticated (buzz word alert!) AI systems. If your people and culture are not tuned in and dedicated to producing quality, it will not happen. In the pulp and paper industry, we have not done such a good job of starting where quality starts--with our people and our culture.
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Thursday, October 19, 2023 1:00 pm
Everything that comes onto your mill site must meet established standards before it gets to your mill site. Multiple suppliers must be in place to provide quick backup if a primary supplier fails. I would dare say the plan for the quality of the product you will make in a month or two must be already established now. When it comes to the quality actions needed from the human component of your operation, that must be planned six months to a year before you need it.
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Thursday, October 12, 2023 1:00 pm
Little did I know when I wrote the column last week, "Quality is Attitude" that there would be a sequel, but here it is. We usually think of quality, and concomitant attitudes about quality, as we think of suppliers serving customers. So, what would you say about customers providing outstanding, unheard-of quality to their suppliers? Would you infer from this that such a company, if it existed, would have quality service so ingrained that their customers could rest assured the quality they receive in service and products is top notch? I have found such a company and unabashedly want to tell you about them and their president.
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Thursday, September 28, 2023 1:00 pm
As we continue to think about quality in a different way this month, I have to say quality is attitude. I have seldom seen an angry person produce quality services or products. Likewise, I have never seen a glib, happy-go-lucky person produce quality either. Let's face it, quality is serious business. It can be a complicated business, too.
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Thursday, September 28, 2023 1:00 pm
Many of us recognize quality and we love to acquire it. Few of us love to create it. We'll explore the love of quality and how to create it this month.
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Thursday, September 21, 2023 1:00 pm
It has been widely reported recently that companies are "quietly cutting" employees. If you are not familiar with this term, it means your job has been eliminated, but you haven't. You'll be put on the sidelines until a place can be found for you. Likely your department has been eliminated, but to avoid paying you a severance package, you are "being placed in inventory" until a position can be found that matches your perceived skill set.
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Thursday, September 14, 2023 1:00 pm
Extremely touchy subject, but I have never let that stop me before. DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) is at least on the lips of every human resource professional today. What should be your posture and response?
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Thursday, September 7, 2023 1:00 pm
It is being reported that Smurfit, of Dublin, Ireland, and WestRock, of Atlanta, Georgia, are in merger talks. These are interesting times indeed. I recall in 1986 when Smurfit bought Container Corporation of America (CCA) with the help of Morgan Stanley. In fact, the combined company name included Morgan Stanley. Long term, that merger did not end well.
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Thursday, August 31, 2023 1:00 pm
There is a new norm for work attendance. It was caused by the Covid lockdown, and if you are not aware of it, you must have been under a rock for the last three years. In the hourly ranks in our mills, it seems to be working itself out. Mills are adopting the twelve-hour day and hourly workers in many cases are working fourteen twelve-hour days out of each twenty-eight days, on various schedules of day and night shift. Maybe this will work and be widely adopted. That is a few hours more than a straight forty hour per week job, but who works forty hours per week. Salaried staff schedules have been more of a problem.
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Thursday, August 24, 2023 1:00 pm
Fos the Rat says, "Every August, I look forward to taking over Mr. Jim's column and providing the insights of the Pulp Rats. This year we've done things a little differently, but here we are, already, at the end of the month. I hope you have enjoyed these interviews as much as I have enjoyed doing them. Let's see what Mr. Jim has to tell us today."
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Thursday, August 24, 2023 1:00 pm
Fos the Rat says, "We've been talking to Mr. Jim this month and he has told us some amazing stories. Let's see what he has for us this week."
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