From Colleagues to Lifelong Friends: Herb Kahn's QCS Story | ABB

Every Friday afternoon, at 2 p.m., in a suburban home in Columbus, Ohio, seven gentlemen, mostly in their 80s, get together to play poker. Five of the group were long-time colleagues in the early days of ABB’s QCS for Pulp and Paper. Two started with the company when it was Industrial Nucleonics, three joined when it was AccuRay, and all five continued with ABB when it purchased the business in 1990. Our card players all feel like winners in one another’s company, and perhaps especially during this 75th anniversary of QCS for Pulp and Paper, because its success was built on their dedication and team efforts.

QCS Pioneer Herb Kahn, now 86, started with Industrial Nucleonics (IN) in 1969. The company’s original sensor had already been commercially sold for some 19 years, and his predecessors largely overcame the first challenges to expanding its use in the pulp and paper industry: convincing customers that the sensor – the beta gauge – was safe and accurate.

“A beta gauge is a nuclear electronic tool using a radioactive isotope – in the case of the paper sensor, that's Krypton 85,” explains Herb. “Beta particles are basically electrons, and the voltage they create was linearized to become a signal that would show the thickness or weight of whatever was between the beta producer and the ion chamber on the other side.”

In the post World War II era, nuclear science was both a hot topic and regarded with some fear. The first task of any salesperson was to convince mill management and machine tenders that the Krypton 85 gas, enclosed in a lead container, was no danger to the workforce. “It’s not a heavy isotope, like plutonium or strontium, it’s light and in gaseous form. Even if it escaped that sealed container, it would dissipate into the atmosphere without doing any harm,” says Herb.

Its value to the pulp and paper industry was its ability to measure the thickness of paper as it travelled through the paper mill.

From left to right: Doug Spence (1969–1996), Herb Kahn (1969–1991), Jim Fisher (1983–2021), Dave Foster (1972–2003) and Phil Frey (1970–2018) - five former colleagues from Industrial Nucleonics and its successor companies, reunited at the regular poker game.

From left to right: Doug Spence (1969–1996), Herb Kahn (1969–1991), Jim Fisher (1983–2021), Phil Frey (1970–2018) and Dave Foster (1972–2003) - five former colleagues from Industrial Nucleonics and its successor companies, reunited at the regular poker game.

Transformation of a laborious quality control process

Before online measurement, mill workers would periodically remove a reel from the machine, cut samples of paper from several points, and take them to a lab to weigh them and roughly determine the average weight of that sheet. If it was heavier than required, they would instruct the machine tender to close the valve a little, so less fiber entered the pulp. Too light? They’d open the valve a fraction. This resulted in a high level of variability from batch to batch of paper.

Online measurement by the gauge allowed continuous readings of weight, so that the machine tenders could make adjustments on the fly, improving the consistent quality of paper produced.

Many existing mills, often running small machines, had difficulty justifying the cost of a quality control system. “Using a results-based economic process,” says Herb, “we showed them that by reducing variability, they could shift their targets: for example, adding moisture or letting moisture remain." Moisture costs less than fiber. “This resulted in dollars saved or dollars gained, and increased throughput because mill managers felt confident of producing quality while running at that level.”

Initially, says Herb, the Industrial Nucleonics gauge measured a fixed point on the passing paper. After a few years, it was mounted in a scanner that moved to and fro across the paper sheet, taking cross-machine measurements and calculating an average thickness. Herb, working as a salesman in New York, serving paper mills in the surrounding region, and his team, were able to demonstrate that this delivered a still greater accuracy of measurement.

“Then,” says Herb, “we added control to it, such that the readings taken controlled the valve, according to an algorithm that we had agreed upon with the individual paper maker.” He adds, “This was all analog control, not digital, so it had its limitations, but at that time, it was very advanced.”

The aim of the paper industry, “is to make as much paper within the bounds of quality constraints as possible,” says Herb. The word got out, “That if you didn't have one of these gauges, you were at a disadvantage.”

AccuRay Senior Management Team as of January 1986.

The reliability factor

Paper makers also demanded assurance of the reliability of the new technology.

“We had our equipment in one St. Regis Paper Mill in Bucksport, Maine,” recalls Herb. They held a meeting every morning and laid out the graphs generated by IN workstations. Every morning, they talked about the quality of the paper in production. “If there was a problem, we were called in, to make sure this wasn't a gauging issue, but rather a paper quality issue. If it was ever a gauging issue, there was hell to pay.” It was important to the mill managers to have an accurate reading so that they could make decisions on a daily basis.

“We sold St. Regis $2 million of equipment – a significant investment in those days,” says Herb, “with that came what we called ‘systems engineering’, but it was actually application engineering.” That is, IN committed many experienced team members to installing the equipment, testing it, and then running tests on the paper and making adjustments alongside the operators – ensuring performance, and return on investment in the technology.

Subsequently, St. Regis ordered Industrial Nucleonics scanners for its other mills in Pennsylvania, West Virginia and South Carolina. “We became their dominant supplier. It was very gratifying,” Herb remembers.

After four years as New York regional manager with five direct reports, Herb became a Divisional Sales Manager, across three U.S. regions, and moved his young family to Columbus, Ohio, where IN was headquartered. Facilitating the reliability of QCS in every way, became his team’s absolute driving force.

Former U.S. President Reagan Visit October 1982

Preferred supplier status

When the James River in Richmond, Virginia, flooded in 1971, the basement of the James River Paper Company was completely inundated. “Our equipment was in the basement,” recalls Herb. It was the company’s only paper mill at the time, its opening gambit in the pulp and paper industry.

“Without being asked, we came and replaced everything, calibrated it all and put it back to work – no charge.” The president of James River Paper Company called Herb and said, “You were the first ones up.” After that he wouldn’t do business with anyone else, and by the late 1990s James River Paper Corporation, as it became known, was the world’s largest paper manufacturer.

“A lot of our customers didn’t want to be too nice to suppliers, because they felt they’d lose negotiating power, but that was one of the most overt compliments from a reliability perspective that our teams ever received,” recalls Herb.

Herb eventually left ABB, became an executive in network communications, and later ran his own financial advisory company for 25 years. He says that “the people I met and the things I learned” during decades building the IN, then AccuRay, then ABB’s Quality Control Systems business have been the most valued aspects of his career.

“I learned so much about paper making, electronics, economics and how to succeed in constantly changing business conditions,” he says. At the cutting edge of pulp and paper technology, he and his colleagues believed absolutely in the value of their product and honed their instincts for playing their cards just right.