21www.rockwellautomation.com/thejournal june 2014 | the journal

The need to replace an obsolete distributed control system led Kimberly-Clark to migrate to a unified control platform, which improved efficiency and achieved significant maintenance savings.

>> “We had a real problem,” says Kim-berly-Clark engineering and techni-

cal leader Bob Kilas. “Our DCS systems were at the far edge of their life cycle, with many obsolete parts that were expensive and hard to find. We knew we couldn’t continue with them, but we believed that migrating the legacy platform to the vendor’s newest system would be costly and not necessar-ily give us better performance.”

The company had Rockwell Auto-mation systems on other applications throughout its plants. “We decided to see if we could use the Plant-PAx™ process automation system on our tissue machines instead of the DCS systems. That way, we could leverage the spare parts, internal technical knowledge and technical support that we were already getting from Rockwell Automation,” Kilas explains.

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22 THE JOURNAL | JUNE 2014 WWW.ROCKWELLAUTOMATION.COM/THEJOURNAL

The tissue machine includes a stock chest where water is mixed with cellulose pulp to make the slurry; the web area where the stock slurry is spread on the

18-foot-wide web belt; a dryer where the stock becomes tissue; and the “creping” end, where the stock is scraped off and sent to the packaging plant in huge rolls.

“The machine is typically three stories high, 180 feet long and 18 feet wide. The unit we upgraded is over 50 years old,” Kilas says. “This is a continuous process. We never shut it down. If the tissue on the web breaks, we just start a new roll.”

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“We wanted to leverage the spare parts,

internal technical knowledge and technical

support that we were already getting from

Rockwell Automation.” Kimberly-Clark’s Bob

Kilas on the company’s decision to migrate its

aging DCS to a unifi ed architecture based on

the PlantPAx system.

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24 THE JOURNAL | JUNE 2014 www.ROckwELLAUTOmATiON.cOm/THEJOURNAL

Legacy Wasn’t Cutting ItThe legacy DCS architecture used proprietary controllers for the ana-log I/O and a proprietary network interface to older Rockwell Automa-tion programmable logic controllers (PLCs) that ran the motors and on/off valves in the wet and dry ends of the machine. The DCS also used a proprietary structured text-language programming system, where the PLCs used ladder logic.

The legacy DCS had 80 PID loops, 180 analog inputs, 60 analog outputs and numerous human-ma-chine interface (HMI) tag groups. It had 65 HMI process graphic screens and 30 programs written in the pro-prietary structured text code.

“We had to hire back a retiree who

had institutional knowledge of the graphic screens to capture the pro-gramming knowledge behind these HMIs,” Kilas notes.

Minimized Conversion RiskThis project was done in parallel with other projects and wasn’t part of the machine-down critical path. “We needed to do it while the machine was running,” he explains. Kimberly-Clark used a common HMI applica-tion and replaced the legacy control-ler, PLC gateway and HMIs, and eliminated the older PLC-5®s.

“We migrated the ladder logic,” Kilas says. “We needed to minimize conversion risk, engineering effort and downtime so we didn’t rewrite the legacy structured text language

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25WWW.ROCKWELLAUTOMATION.COM/THEJOURNAL JUNE 2014 | THE JOURNAL

code, just ported it to ladder.”Describing the lessons learned from this migra-

tion project, Kilas says, “We should have re-written the legacy structured text language code, and after the project, we did do that. We needed to define and do alarm rationalization. We need to provide system status and Ethernet switch health HMI screens. We absolutely have to ensure operator and maintainer training to cope with variations in operator knowledge and experience and use off-line simulation for automa-tion sequences for training.”

The project took 26 weeks from start to the finish. “We improved operator and maintainer efficiency, reset our life-cycle clock from 25 years to new, and

going forward, we now have a single architecture and engineering system for the plant,” says Kilas.

Rockwell Automation Household and Personal Care Solutionswww.rockwellautomation.com/go/hpc

PlantPAx Process Automation Systemwww.rockwellautomation.com/go/prps

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This project was done in parallel with other projects

and wasn’t part of the machine-down critical path.

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