When Domtar Paper's Hawesville mill upgraded its plant-floor control systems, DC Plus designed the network and virtualization that brought it all online — without taking the plant down.
Domtar Paper's Hawesville mill in Kentucky produces upwards of 600,000 short tons of paper each year and has operated since 1967. When the mill set out to upgrade its ABB Advant Distributed Control System (DCS) to ABB's latest 800xA platform, it knew the project would require significant changes to its network infrastructure. The plant had grown islands of automation and legacy networks over the years — each process area running its own loosely connected control system — which were a challenge to maintain. Domtar assembled a team of trusted partners and turned to DC Plus for expertise in systems integration, networking, and virtualization in a live manufacturing environment.
DC Plus evaluated the mill's islands of automation and legacy networks, then developed solutions to better maintain the control system and deliver superior visibility and uptime for Hawesville's operations.
DC Plus recommended a virtualized server infrastructure and a converged network. To facilitate the new DCS, the mill expanded and upgraded its fiber-optic, power, and UPS systems and improved its operator control rooms.
DC Plus designed the network and virtualization platforms with special attention to the redundancies needed to keep the plant running, coordinated with ABB to meet their standards, and delivered hardware for application build-out and functional acceptance testing — letting Hawesville develop its infrastructure while the software was still being built, saving time on the project.
DC Plus developed a strategy to test and install the new system inside a live plant without downtime, using system redundancies to bring servers up one at a time so production stayed on schedule. The team provided critical support through the migration and startup phases.
This project has set a high standard for other Domtar Paper mills. The systems we have built with DC Plus are now standards for virtualized environments throughout our company. The expertise they provided was a key to our success.
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