How Moelven uses Cognite Data Fusion® to optimize process and production

Moelven is an industrial group that produces building products and systems for the construction industry. In support of its mission, to provide sustainable products and solutions by being the best at utilizing existing and future technology, Moelven turned to Cognite Data Fusion® to drive more data-driven solutions and set the foundation for scaling across processes and production units to reduce time spent finding and analyzing data, improve equipment availability, and improve kiln operation and production.

Using Cognite Data Fusion®, Moelven rapidly decreased the time to deliver this ambitious project, taking only:

• 6 weeks to integrate all relevant data sources for production at one site
• 2 weeks to expand from one site to 10 more
• 1 month to scale data-driven solutions across 11 sites

Siloed data limits commercial success

Moelven is one of the biggest Scandinavian wood processing companies, producing approximately two million cubic meters of sawn spruce and pine timber annually. The Moelven group comprises a total of 33 production companies in a number of product areas. Beginning in 2016 with their timber division, Moelven started working towards its vision to create the “smart digital sawmill,” with ambitious goals to increase process efficiency and product value, while reducing energy consumption.

Moelven quickly realized its biggest challenge – and opportunity – was to create better relationships and traceability between data by liberating it from siloed systems and processes. Thereby, enabling measurable process improvements by providing operators with simple access to complex industrial data and visual tools to support better decision-making.

Moelven knew it needed to standardize data in order to scale proven solutions across all of its sites and operations facilities. In addition, Moelven wanted to provide “AI for all,” by putting solutions powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning in the hands of operators to assist decision making and speed up root cause analysis.

An integrated “Digital Plant of the Future”

Moelven used Cognite Data Fusion® to consolidate historian, MES, and control system data, and then contextualize that data into an Open Industrial Digital Twin. The digital twin provides a single, unified view of both historical and real-time data in a clean and contextualized way that mirrors Moelven’s real-world operations.

Cognite Data Fusion® not only contextualized OT and IT data across the value chain to make it more available to users across the organization, but the platform’s intuitive data discovery tools and low-code visualizations also made that data more useful to drive more data driven solutions.

In only six weeks, Moelven integrated all their data within Cognite Data Fusion® and deployed initial solutions that measured safety, quality, delivery, and efficiency across operations.

With Cogntie Data Fusion®, Process Engineers are now able to see real-time and historical performance data in one place - versus previously needing to navigate five or more source systems for information - in order to make data-driven decisions with greater speed and impact.

Moelven also leveraged Cognite Data Fusion® to create a dashboard to assist operators working with drying kilns, which features an AI/ML model that will offer predictions to inform operators with the most likely cause for a deviation or downtime. Operators can create annotations and provide feedback to the model to improve its performance over time.

Increase value in every day production

Moelven wanted to free up data from different sources, consolidate it in one place, and create relationships across that data to drive digital solutions that could be scaled across its organization. With Cognite Data Fusion®, Moelven quickly developed an Open Industrial Digital Twin of its operation to improve the availability and usefulness of data from sawmills and set the foundation for scaling across additional production units to:

• Reduce time spent finding and analyzing data
• Improve equipment availability
• Improve kiln operation and production

Using Cognite Data Fusion®, Moelven rapidly decreased the time to deliver this ambitious project, taking only:

• 6 weeks to integrate all relevant data sources for production at one site
• 2 weeks to expand from one site to 10 more
• 1 month to scale data-driven solutions across 11 sites