Paper Mill Plant Efficiency

It would be very useful for all (including YOU) if you would provide more background on your interests and the intent of your question (you might also want to register on CR4 to capture more attention).

There are cost accountants who could spend the better part of a day providing you with operating parameters that impact paper mill efficiency. Suffice to say, I will outline a few areas:

• Poor beater yields (i.e. labor, raw material or machine efficiency in stock preparation)
• Raw Material Variance (most paper mills expect to use some percentage of recycle material that, effectively, has no cost)
• Start up losses (how much time and material it takes until the process has reached steady state - acceptable product)
• Shut down losses (loss of product quality similar to start up losses)
• Edge Losses (material lost on each edge of the forming wire that cannot be recycled)
• Trim Losses (dried material that does not meet end use width requirements)
• Line Breaks (it's a mess when the web breaks and everything has to be re-started)
• Throughput losses (yes, sometimes the machine has - or is - run at a speed variance to a target or pre-defined standard).
• Basis weight variance (here's one of the most interesting to me since if the paper is sold on a unit weight basis, say $/lb., it is in the paper mill's best interest to produce the paper at the high end of specification; however, if sold on a unit area basis, say $/sq. ft., it is in paper mill's best interest to produce the paper at the low end of specification.)

These measures are true for any continuous process industry. I suspect that you may be interested in more quantitative information but would prefer to hear your feedback before we proceed farther in the discussion.

Where do we go from here?

how paper mill calculate their plant efficiency .

Efficiency of what - the mill, the paper plant or what???