Pulp mill reliability reset

Context

Northvale Pulp (fictional) operates a kraft pulp mill with a maintenance team that had become almost entirely reactive. Unplanned downtime sat at 14%, the backlog was nine weeks deep, and the critical-asset list had not been reviewed in six years.

Every outage felt like an emergency. The team had plenty of data and very little agreement about which assets deserved attention first.

Approach

We ran a criticality workshop with operators, maintenance planners, and the mill engineer, then tested the result against two years of failure history.

• Eight assets accounted for 22% of corrective work orders and a disproportionate share of downtime.
• Two of those assets had no preventive task at all.
• The spare-parts store held expensive slow movers and was missing three critical seals.

The plan was deliberately small: a preventive task list for eight assets, a critical-spares kit, and a shutdown scope frozen six weeks before the outage.

Results

• Unplanned downtime fell from 14% to 5% within nine months.
• The maintenance backlog dropped from nine weeks to three.
• Mean time between failures improved by 38% across the critical-asset group.

What changed

The mill kept a weekly 30-minute reliability review with a standing agenda: repeat failures, overdue critical tasks, and one improvement to close before the next outage. The review survived two leadership changes, which is the part that usually does not.