AI-Driven Decision Support for Industrial Operations

UPM is a leading Finnish forest industry company that has transformed into a global "material solutions" provider. The company operates across six business areas: Fibres, Energy, Raflatac, Specialty Papers, Communication Papers, and Plywood. Headquartered in Helsinki, UPM employs approximately 17,000 people and maintains production plants in 11 countries, including significant pulp mill operations in Finland and Uruguay. The company is currently driven by its "Biofore" strategy, which focuses on creating a future "beyond fossils" by innovating renewable and recyclable alternatives to fossil-based materials.

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We developed Pulp Mentor, an AI assistant designed to support control room technicians and reduce operational downtime.

Key Capabilities Demonstrated:

• Intelligent Logic Translation: We built a custom parser to transform diagrams into graphs, enabling an LLM to "read" and explain complex plant logic in plain text.
• Root Cause Analysis: Our Event Analysis Tool autonomously queries production databases and historical sensor data (PHD) to reconstruct event chronologies and identify potential causes for process disturbances.
• Advanced RAG with "Vision": We implemented a document retrieval system that utilizes figure verbalization, allowing the assistant to understand and search images and diagrams within technical manuals.
• Full Scalability: Built entirely on the Azure ecosystem, the solution leverages GPT-5 models and incorporates a persistent feedback loop to refine its accuracy over time.