By Ryan Olson
Assistant Editor

Designed to enhance quality control operations in the area of paper roll transportation, Finnish company Auramo Inc. has been showing customers the advantages of its small and lightweight device, named The Spy, a tool that travels with paper rolls and takes measurements on a number of variables encountered during the course of the trip from the point of manufacture to the end user.

With the possibility of damage to rolls as a result of being dropped, being subjected to extreme temperatures, or even being hit during transit, The Spy can serve as a valuable diagnostic tool to help determine potential sources of damage.

Once removed from the core of the newsprint roll, The Spy can be plugged into its terminal unit (right) and have its memory contents downloaded to a PC for analysis.
Photos courtesy of Auramo

“It is put inside the core prior to applying the wrapper around the roll, so in fact nobody will know that there is a Spy inside the roll,” explained Peter Merin, who served as the project manager of the Finnish team responsible for The Spy’s development. “That is the whole purpose of the Spy. That is why it is called The Spy.”

The Spy monitors acceleration over a preset threshold, orientation and temperature, as well as time, to notify customers the exact moment at which there might be a change in any of these variables.

“When we say it’s a new item … everybody’s really hearing about it, but it’s actually been out for a couple of years,” explained Dick Wiley, national sales manager for Auramo. “All of the newsprint manufacturers are getting them … In Europe it’s being used by the paper companies and by the railroads.”

Consisting of a logging unit and a carrier unit, which also incorporates a battery compartment, The Spy was designed to fit into a 3-inch paper roll core size. After a newsprint roll has reached its destination, The Spy is removed and the logging unit’s memory contents are downloaded to a portable computer for analysis. The logging unit can then be returned to the sender for additional analysis and reuse.

Depending on the battery pack’s capacity, The Spy is able to function for 12 to 24 months. It can record up to 1,000 acceleration samples, 2,700 temperature and battery voltage samples and 2,000 roll orientation samples, according to Auramo.

“I’ve got about four of these puppies, and I use them periodically,” explained Ken Guthrie, superintendent of finishing and shipping for Bowater Inc. “I love them. We’re primarily looking at impacts … we put them in the core, and [the recipient] will either send them back to us or we will, on occasion, be there and we may take them off ourselves. We’ve been using these things for … two to three years. We got some of the first ones that came out.”

Held in a bracket complete with a power supply (below) long enough to allow it to take measurements for up to 24 months, The Spy is easily inserted into the core of a roll of newsprint where it can take measurements on roll acceleration, orientation and temperature beyond a given threshold.

While domestic paper producers such as Bowater have been using The Spy to track conditions over the course of a shipment’s journey to the end user, the device has seen use overseas, where it was initially developed.

Merin said The Spy was developed together with the Finnish paper mills. “[These mills] had a need to control the quality over their transportation chain, all the way to the customers,” Merin said. “In fact, the initiative, I think, came from the mills, because they needed the device. Auramo was the company who developed it.”

The project began approximately three years ago, and product development took roughly six months.

Merin said The Spy’s creation came about due to the fact that outer roundness and roll damage is becoming a bigger a problem all the time, because the size and weight of newsprint rolls are growing.

“There’s a need to control the quality,” he added.

“The great thing about the Auramo is that it gives such accurate, detailed information about when something occurred,” Guthrie said. “You can get it down to the millisecond, and the ease that you can access that information, once you download it, is really, to me, what sets it apart from [other products].”

At this point, Auramo hopes to make modifications to The Spy’s diagnostic software and make it easier to use.

“We are also trying to get The Spy into different applications,” Merin said. “Other companies shipping other concept products are getting interested in The Spy, [especially for products] that are heavy, expensive, and can experience a lot of damage.”

With help from The Spy, it is Auramo’s hope that a greater degree of control over the quality of product transportation can be put into the hands of paper producers, as well as end users.