Improving Felts – is it really that complicated?

Press felts

Knowledge-sharing to improve production in the papermaking industry is Feltest’s mission, and we recently experienced directly how important this is in our industry. Just in the few weeks since our first webinar How to Assess Press Felts, we are already seeing shifts in our customers’ perception of improving felts in the press section.

This is extremely important for the entire industry. If you can improve your felt performance and the sheet leaves the press section 1% dryer, it will increase your machine’s output by 4% in average. And with every percentage point dryer out of the press section, your output doubles. So, 2% dryer out of the press section means 8% more production!

And all of this without a capex or major investment. The concept is simple: all you have to do is measure your felts every day, create baselines and share these with your felt suppliers. We describe how you can do this in both the webinar and the whitepaper.

So, what is this important shift we at Feltest have been fortunate enough to observe?

During our successful webinar How to Assess Press Felts, Feltest held a survey among all participants. After the webinar, we also distributed a follow-up whitepaper for those who missed the webinar entitled How to Assess Press Felts: The basics for continuous felt improvement.

The responses to certain questions during the webinar were so interesting and insightful for us, we decided to go mainstream and take one question in the survey to LinkedIn.

Again, we were fascinated by what our network was saying, not only papermakers and suppliers, but anyone associated with the papermaking industry. Many of you might not be aware of this, but there is always an inherent risk involved in surveys.

As a company you may discover you are completely oblivious to the challenges your customers face. And this calls for immediate redirection and restrategizing of what your company is doing if you want to remain relevant for your customers.

But you know how the saying goes: No risk, no reward.

And this time, the risk was most definitely worth the reward. We found out we were still right on track with our customers. And equally important, we discovered our mission of knowledge-sharing throughout the papermaking industry remains relevant among our customer base, suppliers and the papermaking industry in general.

The second question in the survey was particularly interesting to us as designers, producers and manufacturers of measuring gauges for the papermaking industry. Since Feltest’s instruments are used in the press section, the very mission and meaning of our company was essentially encapsulated in this second question of the survey:

“Do you think improving felts is complicated?”

We posed this question at the very start of our webinar on June 3rd. As a company, we were reassured that we were still relevant for our customers. The responses to this question were before watching the webinar:

·       71% said, “Yes, improving felts is complicated.”

·       29% said, “No, improving felts isn’t complicated.”

After the webinar and the subsequent distribution of the accompanying whitepaper, we then took the question mainstream to LinkedIn. The answers followed a similar line, but there was a definite improvement among our target group. Fewer respondents viewed improving felts as complicated and more respondents did not consider it complicated:

·       57% said, “Yes, improving felts is complicated”, a drop of 14% since the webinar.

·       43% said, “No, improving felts isn’t complicated”, a rise of 14% since the webinar.

We can conclude that disseminating useful and valuable information effectively can improve the prospects and profitability of the papermaking industry as a whole. Establishing a simple and proven method to increase production by 4% without a major investment for papermakers benefits our entire industry.

This underlines the importance of knowledge-sharing and will steadfastly remain Feltest’s mission for papermaking worldwide.

Would you like to know how you can improve output by 4% without a major investment?

Download our whitepaper How to Assess Press Felts (link to the Webinar included if you prefer to watch)

Want to discuss more with Marcel? Book a (video) call

Remember: Daily Data Powers Production

Marcel Lensvelt

Founder and CEO of Feltest