Earlier this year, Stora Enso announced that they are undertaking the first company-wide global roll out of a digital solution in their mills. Stora Enso stated that "the digital solution in scope is called 'Warehouse Anti Collision solution' and does just what the name indicates - it helps humans and machines to avoid collisions in our warehouses. The goal is now that the solution will be implemented in 64 warehouses in seven countries by the end of 2021."

In the article, Stora Enso further stated that "the solution comprises detectors which employees carry, and other detectors installed on vehicles, like for example forklifts. When the two detectors come close enough to each other, an alarm goes off. Throughout the project, our employees have been highly involved in testing and giving feedback on the solution. Through the testing we made early discoveries - for example, the alarm signals needed tuning since they were irritatingly loud, and the radio signals needed to be strong enough to penetrate objects such as paper rolls.

As the project proceeded, important enhancement areas of the solution were identified. The detectors could also be configured to prevent unauthorized people enter restricted areas - only people carrying a detector should be able to enter. Moreover, what if we could decrease the number of unnecessary alarms going off if we could configure the detectors to work differently in specific safety zones? We solved this challenge by programming the detectors to sense when a human is inside a safety zone and thus deactivating the alarm signal, while also ensuring that a vehicle cannot enter the safety zone at all."

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Helen Roush is Executive Vice President of Paperitalo Publications.