TIMBER

One timber manufacturer looked at using PlantRun to track a specific manufacturing process. However, due to the variability in timber sizes, they opted for a customised solution, which was developed alongside PlantRun engineers to suit their process.

Arbor Forest Products operates a 90-acre site in North Lincolnshire, UK that holds more than 80,000m3 of timber on-site guaranteeing 98 per cent of product in stock at any one time. It facilitates a throughput of over 300,000m3 of quality timber products supplied annually to the distributor, merchant and industrial sectors.

BSW Timber, the UK’s largest sawmilling business, has invested £220,000 in a state-of-the-art plant monitoring system for all its UK sawmills.

The cutting-edge technology automatically monitors the flow of product through BSW's mills in Fort William, Boat of Garten, Newbridge, Petersmuir, Carlisle and Senghenydd. The system continuously calculates operating efficiency and provide reports and analysis on key performance indicators (KPI’s) including downtime , throughput, scrap, OEE etc.

James Jones & Sons, Scotland’s largest independent sawmilling company has taken delivery of a PlantRun production monitoring system to improve efficiency at their Lockerbie site.

The site has three mill areas of varying ages including one older sawline that didn’t have any automated production monitoring system or down time information collection. A PlantRun system has been installed that will collect both down time and production information, and automatically generate live OEE data.

The timber processing industry faces continued pressure on margins and increases in material and operating costs. Inflexibility in sales pricing means that prices cannot be increased in line with costs.  Businesses must therefore focus on reducing costs in order to maintain or improve margins. This must be done in parallel with improved volume and capacity utilization.

Already driven to high efficiency levels to remain competitive in order to achieve incremental improvment it is vital to have access to accurate, high availability production level data. The use of high volume, high capital equipment has particular industry specific requirements. PlantRun is proven in this industry with existing users experiencing benefits such as;