How can the paper industry drive global growth and profitability while creating a sustainable future?

In addition to this challenging economic context, the last couple of years have included one crisis after another, highlighting a compelling need to invest in solutions to be more agile and resilient.

Sustainability a top consumer trend

Industries need to moderate their use of energy, water, and raw materials, thereby being more and more sustainable while continuing to produce to satisfy customer needs. These are the challenges that we are all facing. Transforming those challenges into opportunities to improve our processes and businesses is in alignment with our vision at Tietoevry to create purposeful technology that will reinvent the world for good.

Packaging looking at demand growth

The explosive increase in e-commerce during Covid lockdowns all over the world immediately carried over to the packaging industry. This almost overnight change in consumption patterns is continuing. The carton and board industry are therefore looking at consistently high, even growing demand globally.

By 2023, the global production of pulp and paper will reach 490 million tonnes, and according to projections made by Pitney Bowes, 100 billion packages will be shipped worldwide in 2023.

Tissue demand rising along with living standards

Tissue is another fast-growing product area, especially in markets where standards of living are rising. Asia is the geographical area where the growth of this segment is strongest. Because of the low margins, tissue needs to be produced in a smart way and close enough to the end markets, balancing price, and quality.

Go digital to cope

To address those trends, we foresee a lot of companies to increase their focus on new sustainable product development. The need for improving the production yield and efficiency will be key to support this expected massive sustainable growth.

There are technologies in place now that a few years ago would have been just figments of the imagination. You can visualize your actual operation status and guide your people to work where needed while securing the product quality as well as your operational efficiency. You can combine the current operational status with predicted future customer demand to react quickly to a constraint and still continue to optimize your production processes. You can simulate your end-to-end supply chain to quickly adapt your production to any coming raw material shortage and replacement. You can even achieve a completely autonomous operational process!

What is continuing to happen this year?

We believe these will be the main drivers:

• Transforming your business and leveraging the power of technology and Generative AI.
• Finding new ways of working to improve and secure the customer demand.
• Designing better, sourcing better and producing better to achieve global sustainable growth.
• Developing more resiliency to change to ensure profitability as well as to be more respectful of the environment we are living in.

By leveraging technology to digitalize the value chain, pulp, paper and fibre companies will be able to increase local innovation that will lead to more resilient capabilities as well as unparalleled agility. This will support the global quest for effectivizing, simplifying and harmonizing the entire value chain, while at the same time ensuring production flexibility in the face of rapid demand fluctuation.

Our mission is to support your sustainable and profitable growth by delivering proven, best-in-class systems and technology. As the global market leader in pulp, paper and fibre mill systems, we will be happy to help you towards your optimal performance and business transformation.

Get in touch, let’s talk more!

Romuald Royer
Principal Business Consultant, Pulp, Paper & Fibre,
Tietoevry Industry