"We had a real problem," said Kimberly-Clark engineering and technical leader Bob Kilas. "Our DCS systems were at the far edge of their lifecycle, with many obsolete parts that were expensive and hard to find. We knew we couldn't continue with them, but we believed that migrating to the latest platform upgrade would be costly and not necessarily give us better performance."
The company had Rockwell Automation systems on other applications throughout its plants. "We decided to see if we could use PlantPAx 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 continued.