Valmet

Valmet is a Finnish industry group that was reborn through the demerger of the pulp, paper and power businesses from Metso Group in December 2013. Today, the group has over 12 000 employees spread over more than 30 countries.

Valmet manufactures and sells intelligent production lines for the global pulping and fiber industry. The complete process from log to packaged pulp bales is covered.

Within the area Baling Systems (pulp bale management) Valmet was an early adaptor of configurators and they substituted their first configurator salesPLUS in favor of COMBINUM in 2008.

Within the Fiber area, which is significantly larger, Metso has been working actively with modularization and created common work methods in the quote process within the different product areas, such as Woodhandling, Cooking and Fiberline. Recently, they were ready to take the step into a configurator for the complete process and once again, the choice was COMBINUM.

COMBINUM simplifies and streamlines the quote process.

Tomas Edström, Vice President - Process Automation at Valmet

Needs

  • Standardize the product offering by creating a "product shelf"
  • Simplify and streamline the quote process
  • Standardize the way of working between the product areas
  • De-centralize the quote process and enable parallel work between the product areas
  • Create interfaces for exchange of quote data between different systems

Users

Valmet has today 75 users and estimates to increase to 100 users in Sweden, Finland, India, China, Japan, Brazil and USA when the deployment fully completed.

Solution

Within every product area, an extensive modularization work has been done to define how the production lines can be configured. Examples of production lines are Cooking, Fiberline and Pulp Drying.

The production lines have been divided into module layouts which in turn consist of a number of positions. In a position, a set of modules can be selected. A module is usually some kind of machine, such as a pump or a heat exchanger.

Each module is configurable and is therefore modeled as a product in COMBINUM with an associated item structure. As of today, close to 2 000 configurable products are managed – each with its own set of parameters, rules and items. We’re talking about a lot of product data and large quotes consisting of a tree with configurations and child configurations.

Import functions from Excel are used to simplify and streamline the input of large quantities of data. In COMBINUM Architect imported products, parameters and items are completed with the required set of rules.

Reports have been designed using COMBINUM Reports to auto-generate a set of documents and lists for the quotes. In the reports, configuration data is combined with rule controlled texts and standard texts. Valmet's standard document layout is applied to the reports.

Integrations have been built to a flow sheet builder and to the site management system SiteBase® to feed them with configuration data.

In the scope of a quote, the user can also include alternatives and options and configure these as desired. Alternatives and options are tagged so that they can be separated from the main offering in reports and to other systems fed by the configurator.

Tomas Edström, Vice President - Process Automation at Valmet

"COMBINUM simplifies and streamlines the quote process. It controls the sales process by selecting solutions from our product shelf."

"COMBINUM helps us to harmonize our way of working globally in the sales process."