Paper mills lose $10,000–$25,000 per month to avoidable trim waste. Deckle Plus replaces whiteboard planning with a two-phase optimizer that finds sub-0.5% waste patterns in under 30 seconds, across every grade, every winder, every shift.
A Kraft paper mill running a 3600mm deckle at 70 tonnes per day with 3% trim waste discards 2.1 tonnes of paper per day. At $700/tonne, that is $1,470 per day, over $44,000 per month, leaving the machine as scrap strips on the floor. The cause is rarely laziness. It is that combinatorial optimization at scale is simply impossible to do by hand.
A 75 t/day Kraft paper mill operated two winders: a 3600mm primary winder and a 4800mm secondary. The head planner had 12 years of experience and ran daily deckle calculations on a whiteboard using ruler and marker. For a typical morning queue of 10–14 customer orders, planning took 90–120 minutes and still produced patterns with 2.8–3.5% trim waste.
The breaking point came when a key customer (a large packaging converter) asked for waste event logs and traceability documentation that the mill simply could not produce. Production records existed only on shift sheets filed in a cabinet. There was no digital history, no per-run waste breakdown, and no way to answer the question: 'Which shift produced the batch that arrived short-weight?'
Deckle Plus was configured on both winders during a 2-day onboarding. The optimizer immediately found patterns the planner had not considered: combinations that fit 11 customer widths into a 3600mm deckle with 0.38% residual trim. Planning time fell from 90 minutes to 15 minutes. Operators logged waste events directly on the floor execution screen. By the end of week three, the head planner was using the system to mentor two junior planners instead of doing manual calculations.
Result
Trim waste fell from 3.1% to 0.4%, recovering approximately $25,000 per month in raw material at 75 t/day.
Kraft 70–200 GSM, Duplex 200–450 GSM, Newsprint, Coated, and Cylinder Mould paper are all handled in the same order queue with grade-specific optimization constraints. Add custom grades for specialty papers your mill produces.
Each physical winder is configured with its own deckle width, blade count, and waste targets. Production runs are assigned per machine. Orders can be split across winders when capacity demands it.
Parent reel receipts are logged at intake with supplier lot, GSM, and weight. The system allocates inventory on a first-in-first-out basis and tracks consumption per machine per production run, giving you real cost-of-goods visibility.
Operators log trim events, reel breaks, and splice waste directly on the floor execution screen during the run. Management sees shift-by-shift waste trends in real time, not at month-end.
On run close, Deckle Plus generates a PDF delivery challan with customer name, order widths, quantity, GSM, and run reference. No more typing challans in Word or Excel after the shift ends.
Every pattern selection, order change, and waste event is timestamped with the user who made it. Full traceability across shifts, machines, and grades, replacing paper logbooks.
Specific questions about how Deckle Plus handles this use case.
Yes. In Deckle Plus each production run is assigned to a specific machine and a specific paper grade loaded for that shift. If your winder runs 80 GSM Kraft in the morning and 300 GSM Duplex in the afternoon, you create two separate production runs, each optimized against the grade's blade constraints and waste targets. Both runs appear in the machine's run history for full traceability across shifts.
Deckle Plus supports any deckle width. Winders typically range from 1800mm to 5600mm, all configured in the machine setup form. GSM values are user-defined per paper grade; the optimizer uses them for reel weight calculations and constraint validation. Common ranges are 60–120 GSM for Kraft and 200–450 GSM for Duplex board.
Yes. The Suite plan supports unlimited machine lines. Each machine is configured with its own deckle width and blade count. Production runs are assigned per machine, and the optimizer produces machine-specific patterns. The Suite plan also handles multi-machine inventory allocation. Parent reels received at intake are tracked to whichever machine consumes them via FIFO.
Order changes after plan confirmation are handled via the Sandbox feature. The planner creates an isolated Sandbox copy of the current run, adds or modifies the order, re-optimizes, and compares new versus original waste totals side-by-side. If the modified plan is better, it can be promoted to replace the live run (Suite plan). This eliminates ad-hoc floor changes that bypass the optimization step.
Yes. Deckle Plus maintains a full digital audit trail per production run: who planned, who executed, waste events logged with timestamp and user, patterns used, and delivery challan generated. This traceability data is accessible in the run history at any time and can be exported. The audit trail format satisfies the documentation requirements most large packaging and FMCG customers request from their paper suppliers.
Book a 20-minute call. We'll confirm Deckle Plus fits your specific workflow and show you a live optimization on your order data before you invest any further time.