Design partnership
One machine, a defined baseline, a signed reconciliation at the end. A small number of slots remain [ASPIRATIONAL].
Contact
Start with the machine that is costing you the most.
The most useful first conversation is about one machine, one grade portfolio and one measurable problem. Bring a historian extract and we can tell you within a week whether this is worth doing.
Live example: Grade change PM4 · 135 gsm kraftliner → 110 gsm testliner, no break, ≤14 min off-spec
Contact
Tell us about your machine
The more specific the machine and the problem, the more useful the first call is. Every field is optional except the ones marked required.
Direct contact
- Design partnerships
- partners@pulpum.com
- Sales and enterprise
- sales@pulpum.com
- Security and OT review
- security@pulpum.com
- Careers
- careers@pulpum.com
- Press
- press@pulpum.com
Addresses are provisioned on the pulpum.com business domain. [ASPIRATIONAL — pre-launch]
What happens next
- 01We read it
A founder reads every message. No routing queue.
- 02A 30-minute call
Your machine, your grades, your actual problem.
- 03A data review
A historian extract tells us in a week whether this is worth doing.
- 04A written proposal
Scope, baseline definition and what we will and will not claim.
Reasons
Why people get in touch
Pick whichever is closest and say so in the message.
Enterprise evaluation
A group-level assessment across multiple mills, usually starting with a fleet baseline review.
Technical deep dive
Your automation and process engineers versus ours, on architecture, guardrails and failure modes.
Security review
Network architecture, data residency, identity, audit and OT segmentation, with documentation supplied in advance.
Partnership
Automation vendors, engineering firms, integrators and robotics suppliers who cover mills we do not.
A role
Perception, control, simulation, process science and deployment. Tell us what you want to own.
Run timeline
What we would be deploying
The run engine you would be evaluating, shown end to end.
run_8f21c4
PM4 · 6.8 m trim · 1,180 m/min
SUCCEEDED
-
01
ingest.grade_target
SUCCEEDED
0.8 s
Mill Orchestrator — Pulled the 110 gsm testliner spec, customer tolerances and the standing energy budget from mill MES; locked the target envelope for the run.
-
02
twin.simulate
SUCCEEDED
34 s
Mill Orchestrator — Simulated 48 candidate transition recipes on the as-run paper-machine twin — forming, press, dryer and calender — and ranked them on off-spec tonnes, break risk and steam.
-
03
stock.refine
SUCCEEDED
2 m 10 s
Pulp-and-Stock — Stepped refiner specific edge load 1.9 → 1.4 Ws/m and pushed freeness toward 412 CSF while consistency held at 3.4%.
-
04
wetend.dose
SUCCEEDED
1 m 26 s
Wetend-and-Chemistry — Retention aid trimmed to 214 g/t and sizing to 1.1 kg/t against live charge and turbidity; first-pass retention recovered to 78% inside 90 seconds.
-
05
form.headbox
SUCCEEDED
1 m 05 s
Form-and-Press — Re-cut the slice profile across 78 actuators and set jet-to-wire to 0.994 to hold formation index through the basis-weight ramp.
-
06
press.nip
SUCCEEDED
48 s
Form-and-Press — Nip load reduced 620 → 540 kN/m to protect the lighter web; post-press dryness landed at 47.1%.
-
07
dry.steam
SUCCEEDED
3 m 18 s
Dry-and-Coat — Re-phased the steam schedule across 6 dryer groups and rebalanced the hood; reel moisture converged to 7.4% ±0.19 2σ at 6.1% less steam than the standing recipe.
-
08
inspect.web
SUCCEEDED
continuous
Defect-and-Inspect — 18 line-scan cameras streaming; two edge-crack precursors detected at the drive side and cleared by a 40 kN/m nip trim before either propagated.
-
09
approve.human
APPROVAL
52 s
Mill Orchestrator — Speed ramp 1,180 → 1,245 m/min exceeded the site autonomy threshold. Held for the machine tender; approved by J. Okonkwo at 04:57:12.
-
10
reel.qualify
SUCCEEDED
1 m 31 s
Quality-and-Conformance — Reel R-24188 released: full genealogy written (furnish, chemistry, CD profiles, defect map, operator actions) and checked against grade spec.
First 90 days
What an engagement looks like
Deliberately slow at the start, because the write path deserves it.
Week 0
A 30-minute call about the machine and the problem, followed by a historian extract request.
Weeks 1–2
Data review. We tell you what we can see in your own data, including if the answer is that we cannot help.
Weeks 3–6
Mill-edge install, connectors, tag mapping and scan alignment. Shadow mode from the end of this window.
Weeks 7–10
Advisory recommendations in the HMI. Acceptance rate is the metric the crew and we both watch.
Weeks 11–13
Supervised writes on a narrow tag allow-list, expanded only at the crew's request.
Day 90
Reconciliation against the agreed baseline, signed by both sides, whatever it says.
Enterprise
Standardise autonomy across the group
One policy model, one audit trail, one benchmark across every machine in every mill — with the grade and furnish models kept private to each site.
- SSO, SCIM and role-based access down to the tag level
- Group-wide autonomy policy with per-site override and approval chains
- Cross-mill benchmarking on broke, breaks, steam and first-pass quality
- VPC, on-prem and fully air-gapped mill-edge deployment options
- 99.5% control-plane SLA; edge autonomy survives control-plane loss
- Dedicated deployment engineer and quarterly model review per site
Pricing
Priced per machine, per mill, per group
Land on one workflow with a measurable baseline. Expand by machine, module and autonomy level. Outcome components available on broke, breaks and energy.
Wet-end, forming and drying control or web inspection for a single machine. For mills validating ROI on the wedge.
- One machine, one agent module
- Mill-edge inference node included
- QCS + DCS read, guarded write
- Run log, audit trail, reel genealogy
- Business-hours support
The whole loop: all nine agents, the orchestrator and the as-run paper-machine twin across every machine on site.
- Pulp/stock, wet-end, form/press, dry/coat
- Defect + break prediction on every machine
- Profile, quality, yield and takt optimisation
- Robotic reel and roll handling
- As-run digital twin + grade-change sequencing
- 24/7 support, quarterly model review
Multi-site groups standardising on Pulpum, with custom grade, furnish and tolerance models.
- Multi-site fleet management
- Custom grade / furnish / tolerance models
- Mill edge fleet with air-gapped option
- Group autonomy policy and approval chains
- SLAs, SSO/SCIM, dedicated engineer
Guardrails
An agent that can move a nip needs a leash
Pulpum writes to production equipment. Every capability is scoped, every write is policy-checked, and every action is written to an append-only audit log the mill owns.
- Bounded action space. Each agent can only write to an explicit tag allow-list, inside per-tag rate and magnitude limits.
- Policy engine before every write. Autonomy level, shift, grade, interlock state and operator presence are all evaluated before a setpoint moves.
- Human-in-the-loop gates. Anything above the site threshold — speed ramps, grade releases, safety-adjacent moves — waits for a named approver.
- Immutable audit log. Append-only, hash-chained, exportable, and retained on the mill's own storage.
- Hard fallback. Loss of the edge node, the network or the model returns control to the DCS's last known-good state within one scan cycle.
- Tenant and IP isolation. Furnish recipes, grade models and defect libraries never cross a customer boundary. On-prem deployment available.
Compliance posture
| Standard | Scope | Status |
|---|---|---|
| SOC 2 Type II | Cloud control plane | RUNNING In progress [ASPIRATIONAL] |
| ISO 27001 | Company-wide ISMS | QUEUED Planned [ASPIRATIONAL] |
| IEC 62443 | Mill-edge OT security | RUNNING Design-aligned |
| GDPR | Operator data | SUCCEEDED Compliant |
| ISO 9001 / FSC | Quality + chain of custody records | SUCCEEDED Supported |
From the control room
What machine tenders say
Autonomy earns trust one shift at a time. These are design-partner quotes from pilot deployments [ASPIRATIONAL].
"The first thing that convinced the crew wasn't the control — it was the log. You can scroll back and see exactly why it dropped the nip. Nobody argues with a timestamp."
Machine tender · PM4 · Nordkraft Mills
"We had two people who could do a clean 135-to-110 transition. One retired in March. The twin now does the sequencing and the second one supervises it."
Production manager · Aurora Board
"Break prediction was the wedge. Ninety seconds of warning is the difference between a nip trim and four hours of threading."
Process engineer · Ternvik Paper
Integrations
It speaks mill, not cloud
Pulpum reads and writes through the systems already on the floor. No rip-and-replace, no parallel historian, no new HMI to learn.
Valmet IQ, ABB 800xA QCS, Honeywell Experion MX
Profiles, scans, lab results
ABB 800xA, Valmet DNA, Honeywell Experion, Siemens PCS 7
Setpoint reads and guarded writes
WIS/WMS line-scan, IR and transmission cameras
Frames, defect maps, break replays
SAP PP/QM, ABB cpmPlus, custom historians
Orders, grades, reel genealogy
OSIsoft PI, Aspen IP.21, InfluxDB
Time-series backfill and replay
NVIDIA Isaac, winder and wrapper PLCs
Reel, roll and clamp-truck motion
Azure AD, Okta, on-prem LDAP
SSO, RBAC, named approvers
NVIDIA Jetson Orin, IGX, on-prem GPU
Sub-100 ms inference at the machine
FAQ
Straight answers
The questions mill managers and process engineers actually ask in the first meeting.
Yes, but only within an explicit tag allow-list with per-tag rate and magnitude limits, and only at the autonomy level your site has set. Level 1 is advisory-only: Pulpum recommends and a human enters everything. Most mills spend their first weeks there before enabling supervised writes.
Control returns to the DCS last known-good state within one scan cycle. Pulpum is designed as a supervisory layer on top of your existing control system, never as a replacement for it, so a Pulpum outage degrades the mill to its current way of running — not to a stop.
Break prediction and defect classification typically need 8 to 12 weeks of QCS, DCS and inspection history per grade family, plus labelled break events. Advisory recommendations start in week one from the physics-based twin, and improve as mill-specific history accumulates.
Only if you choose cloud training. Recipes, grade models and defect libraries are tenant-isolated and never used to train another customer's models. A fully on-prem deployment with an air-gapped mill edge is available for sensitive producers.
You are, the same as with any control strategy — which is why every write is policy-checked, bounded, logged and reversible, and why anything above your risk threshold waits for a named approver. The audit log records the request, the reasoning, the limits applied and the human decision.
A 90 to 120 day mill-edge deployment on one paper machine, scoped to a single workflow with a pre-agreed baseline [ASPIRATIONAL]. Weeks 1–3 are connection and shadow-mode observation; weeks 4–8 advisory; weeks 9+ supervised or bounded writes if the mill is satisfied with the recommendations.
Get started
Or just send the extract
Twelve weeks of QCS and DCS history from one machine tells us more than any meeting.