Crane Control and Production Automation for a Major North American Paper Producer

How Applied Motion Systems rewrote a broken multi-vendor automation system – live, in production – and more than doubled throughput across seven tissue-converting lines

The Problem: A New System That Couldn’t Run

A large-scale capital investment doesn’t have to fail catastrophically to fail; sometimes it just underperforms, consistently, expensively, and without an obvious single cause.

A major North American paper producer had commissioned seven new tissue-converting production lines across two facilities. The equipment came from a global supplier list. Each vendor delivered their component, yet nobody really owned how those components were connected to one another, and the integration of these components fell well short of optimum.

The result was a system running at roughly 30% of maximum production potential. Parent rolls, cylinders of paper weighing 5,000 to 7,000 pounds, couldn’t reliably move through the production sequence; automated sequences broke mid-cycle; and operators were often forced to run complex multi-subsystem equipment in manual mode. When you’re running something this involved manually, someone is eventually going to make a mistake.

The incidents escalated: chucked rolls were accidentally dropped from eight to ten feet, crane positioning errors placed rolls incorrectly in the unwind stands, and on one line, a positioning failure had caused a parent roll to miss-chuck, and when the line accelerated to production speed, the roll caught fire, and the fire ran up through the converting machine. In a paper facility, that’s not a maintenance event; that’s a potential total loss.

Six months of internal troubleshooting had not resolved the problem, and the manufacturer’s parent company convened plant managers from across North America and asked directly: Who can fix this? Five of the eight managers, independently, wrote down the same name.

The ask: take one production line, find everything that’s broken, and fix it, while the line is still required to produce.

The Solution: Owning the Integration Layer

The core problem wasn’t any single subsystem. It was that the integration between subsystems had never received the needed attention to ensure reliable operation: the logic governing how a laser-guided vehicle hands off to a conveyor, how a conveyor hands off to a chucking tower, how a chucking tower hands off to an overhead crane, and how a crane places a parent roll into an unwind stand with the accuracy required to run safely at production speed was spotty at best, and completely inadequate at worst.

AMS was engaged on a time-and-materials basis for the first line, with the understanding that demonstrated results would trigger a full rollout. The engagement began not with code changes, but with learning the process, what each handoff required, what the failure modes actually were, and what the correct sequence of verified states looked like from delivery through unwind.

That process-first orientation quickly led to territory that exceeded a typical software integration scope.

The chucking mechanism, the subsystem that inserts steel-tipped plugs into the ends of the parent roll’s cardboard core so the crane can safely lift it, was found to be unreliable by design. The interface components were redesigned. The original plan also required operators to spin heavy parent rolls by hand to remove damaged outer paper layers before the roll could enter the machine. The friction involved made this effectively impossible in some cases, especially with out of round rolls. AMS added a motorized drive to the chucking tower, allowing operators to clear broke from a parent roll with a button press.

The laser scanning system in the plugging towers was instrumented to take four-quadrant measurements of each roll’s core, establishing the exact center point and orientation so that chuck insertion could be calculated precisely rather than estimated. That same positional data informs the crane.

AMS took full programmatic control of the overhead crane. In normal production, no operator touches the crane remote. The system calculates lift height from laser measurements, lowers the crane hooks to the chucked roll, verifies engagement via force transducers in the hooks, confirms even load distribution, lifts and carries the roll to the calculated coordinates of the unwind stand, and verifies placement before releasing. Chuck verification, a sequence that confirms full engagement before any crane movement is authorized, was built specifically to prevent the class of failure that caused the fire on the adjacent line.

The full sequence rewrite was done by AMS engineers working in the live control code while the machine was in production. There was no scheduled downtime, and there were no original drawings; every mechanical measurement was taken in the field. The initial phase was incremental: patch what’s broken, enough to keep production moving, map the full scope of failure modes, then undertake the complete rewrite. That rewrite rebuilt every handoff in the sequence with explicit state verification at each transition.

The Results: What Changed

The first production line moved from approximately 30% of maximum production potential to the high 70s over the course of nine to twelve months of iterative, live-system work. That is more than a doubling of effective throughput on a line that was already installed and theoretically running.

The safety profile changed structurally, not just statistically. The redesigned chucking components eliminated the mechanical failure mode behind load drops, and chuck verification eliminated the failure mode behind the fire. These aren’t reduced-frequency events; they’re addressed at the design level.

The customer’s response was to issue a purchase order for the same scope of work across all remaining six lines at two facilities. That decision reflects something beyond satisfaction with an outcome; it reflects confidence that the approach was sound and repeatable.

AMS’s involvement in the project also surfaced the core cleaning subsystem as a candidate for a ground-up redesign, an observation that subsequently became a separate project at another facility.

Throughput: First line from ~30% to the high 70s of maximum production potential, more than 2× effective output

Scale: Improvements rolled out across 7 lines at 2 facilities following first-line results

Safety: Chuck verification and mechanical redesign eliminated the failure modes behind both the load-drop incidents and the fire

Labor: Automated sequences eliminated manual intervention in the production cycle; motorized broke removal replaced an unsafe manual process

About Applied Motion Systems

AMS is a systems integrator and machine builder. Our work spans motion control and industrial automation systems across paper converting, web handling equipment, aerospace tooling, renewable energy, and applications most companies haven’t tried before.

We take on projects where the integration problem is real, and the stakes of getting it wrong are high. That means learning the process before touching the equipment, owning the outcome across software, mechanical, and safety domains, and building systems that are still performing reliably long after the commissioning team has gone home.

If you are working through an automation challenge that standard integration approaches haven’t been able to solve, we would welcome the conversation.