SKF, the globally renowned name in manufacturing of bearings and seals, is focused on driving intelligent and clean growth, by contributing towards sustainability, and by having more and more digital solutions. This information was shared by Mr. Sujeeth Pai – Director, Industrial Business, SKF India, while having interaction with Paper Mart during Paperex 2023.
Paper Mart: Please walk us through the business journey of SKF, its major milestones and achievements.
Sujeeth Pai: SKF is a world leading bearing and seal manufacturing company founded in Gothenburg, Sweden, in 1907. A century and many groundbreaking inventions later, our innovative spirit lives on, as we help the industry reduce friction. We are represented in around 129 countries, with more than 40,000 employees and 17,000 distributor locations worldwide. Our products can be found literally anywhere in society. In fact, wherever there is rotation there might be SKF bearings, seals and lubrication systems at work, with the support of our condition monitoring and maintenance services.
SKF started its operations in India in 1923 and today provides industry-leading products and solutions including bearings and units, seals, lubrication solutions and services for automotive and industrial sectors. In 2023, achieved our 100-year milestone in India, celebrating the decisive role we played in shaping industries and societies with our products and solutions. Over the years, the company has evolved from being a pioneer ball bearing manufacturing company to a knowledge-driven engineering company helping customers achieve sustainable and competitive business excellence.
With a strong commitment to research-based innovation, SKF India offers customized value-added solutions that provide competitive advantage to customers. We have a pan India footprint consisting of 6 manufacturing facilities, 12 offices, a nation-wide supplier network, over 300 distributors and a strong employee base.
PM: What is the product portfolio and services offered by SKF?
SP: SKF’s ability to master the complexity of meeting customer needs across a wide range of industries and numerous geographies, is our greatest strength and a key to our success. Our broad business reach gives us a platform to drive profitable growth, as it allows us to continuously target the most attractive opportunities.
We are a complete end-to-end solution provider. Apart from bearings, we offer lubrication systems, condition monitoring systems as well as remanufacturing services. In addition, we have unique products such as the RecondOil that uses Double Separation Technology – a patent technology from SKF, which allows reuse of lubrication oil. SKF RecondOil’s innovative oil regeneration system enables circular use of oil, reducing waste and improving environmental performance.
Apart from this we focus a lot on digitalization with our condition monitoring products. The goal is to make sure that we monitor all the assets in real time so that we get to know in advance if something is going wrong. We monitor vibrations and if the vibrations are beyond a particular limit, then our engineers work with the customers to make the necessary changes thus reducing the unplanned downtime.
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PM: What are your products’ application areas and industries catered to?
SP: Bearings are required for anything that rotates, and to rotate without friction is what we focus on. You also need to lubricate these bearings, which is where we have lubrication systems, and you also need to mount and dismount these bearings when you change them for maintenance and that is where we have our maintenance products. SKF’s solutions provide sustainable ways for companies across the automotive and industrial sectors to achieve breakthroughs in friction reduction, energy efficiency, and equipment longevity and reliability.
PM: Shed light on your products & technologies offered specifically to the pulp & paper industry.
SP: Bearings go in wherever there are rolling elements and in the paper industry, it is all about rolling. From the debarking drums to the reeler at the end of a paper machine, the pulp and paper industry relies on process-critical machinery, often operating in demanding conditions that can shorten the service life of bearings. When you look at different stages, you notice there are very high temperatures in one stage, while there is a lot of moisture in another stage. These are very different conditions where you need the products to work differently. SKF helps companies increase the reliability and availability of their machinery.
To stay productive and profitable, pulp and paper making companies need to focus on selecting the appropriate bearings, which need to be mounted properly, lubricated, and carefully monitored and maintained to provide maximum machine availability. By combining our products and knowledge, we can offer different technologies for different sections of the paper industry and improve the performance of the pulp and paper machine.
Sealed Bearing:
When you look at the whole paper process, in the first couple of stages, there is a lot of moisture. There is a high probability of this moisture getting into the bearings, following which the bearings can stop working and affect the whole process. There is also a chance of the whole line stopping as these are continuous processes. The alternative is to put grease, but when you put grease manually, the grease can come out and go on to the paper and waste the whole thing. Our solution to this problem is sealed bearings and the advantage of having a sealed bearing is that moisture does not get in. Customers don’t have to continuously lubricate it and hence, it extends the life of a machine, which in turn, increases the efficiency of the whole process.
CARB Bearing:
You have other stages in the paper manufacturing process, where you have very high temperature, speed and load with high changes of misalignment. In such cases, we have something called the CARB bearings, which is again a patent SKF technology. CARB toroidal roller bearings are unique, these are self-aligning bearings, which accommodate misalignment without increased stress levels. They also provide frictionless axial movement within the bearing in the non-locating position in self-aligning bearing arrangements. They can accommodate higher load levels and provide significantly extended service life.
The CARB bearings can take a lot of misalignments, leading to less maintenance and reduced downtime for the paper industry. Reduced downtime leads to less energy consumption, higher production and also decreases the carbon footprint.
Automatic Lubrication System:
Another key offering is the Automatic Lubrication System. When you have confined spaces, the customers have to stop the whole process, wait for the temperatures to go down, and then lubricate the machines. Centralized Automatic Lubrication System are an effective way to increase machine availability while reducing reliance on scarce talent. These systems provide the appropriate lubrication quantity at the correct intervals, minimizing friction and wear and optimizing bearing and machinery service life. You continue to have the bearing operating at optimum efficiency and that keeps the process running 24×7.
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PM: Please share information about your R&D initiatives.
SP: SKF’s ability to continuously develop products and services that enhance our customers’ competitive advantage is achieved in two ways: by investing in core technology areas and specialists, and by combining the resulting knowledge to address specific requirements. SKF has a strong global network of research and development (R&D) centres and laboratories, as well as established collaborations with major universities and research institutes, and the creation of new centres and collaborations is ongoing. SKF continues to increase its activities in the R&D arena with a greater focus on new products and services which have a positive impact on the environment.
PM: What is your future strategy? How can you contribute more to the paper industry in the coming future?
SP: We are working hard to help our customers reach significant energy and corresponding carbon reductions by making our products lighter, more efficient, longer lasting and repairable. We work just as hard to reduce the carbon emissions related to our own operations and supply chain in line with our Net Zero targets. For the pulp and paper industry, SKF can add value as a complete solution provider, compared to just being a bearing provider. As sustainability is becoming a key factor for many companies, our goal is to provide clean and intelligent products and solutions to our customers. When it comes to sustainability, we continue to work on pilot projects with some customers globally. We also have a tool to help industry understand and address carbon emissions, where customers can explore how CO2 emissions related to the production and use phase of bearings are distributed in different industries. Secondly, through industrial bearing remanufacturing in pulp and paper, we can help companies realize significant savings by extending the service life of their bearings.
Another area of interest for us is the focus by many companies on running non-stop operations 24×7 without a break, which means having no downtime. We continuously work with paper industry customers to provide them innovative products and solutions so that they can accelerate their path towards better asset management and increased reliability.
PM: Share your thoughts about technology adoption & digitalization in the paper and pulp industry? What contributions is SKF making towards the digital revolution of the paper industry?
SP: Technology has been around for a long time. But it is about how companies use that technology to achieve their goals and objectives. We focus a lot on educating our customers on how technology can help them, to either reduce their downtime or make them more sustainable as a company. Today we have various offerings such as AI Industrial Analytics solutions for downstream applications which helps customers to increase output and product quality. Going forward, we will continue to invest and focus on digitalization, as we go along.
When it comes to intelligent and clean growth, one is of course towards sustainability, but the other one is towards having more and more digital solutions. One of the products that we launched this year is called Axios. SKF Axios is a new solution based on a collaboration between us and Amazon Web Services, Inc (AWS) and helps improve machine reliability. SKF Axios is a fully automated condition monitoring solution comprising of sensors, gateways and a machine-learning service that is easy to install, commission and scale, allowing sensors and apps to be operational within minutes. It detects anomalies and pushes notifications, allowing for quick action to avoid unexpected machine failures. The product combines SKF’s knowledge of rotating machinery and predictive maintenance with industrial AI services of AWS to enable smarter, better decision-making.
