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APPLICATIONS & INITIATIVES

IMPROVE THE WAY YOU MANAGE DOWNTIMES IN YOUR MILL

Downtimes are one of the key performance indicators of the operational efficiency of your mill. PMP SOLUTIONS can help improve the way you manage them.

Holistic Downtime Management

Keeping a thorough record of the downtimes in your mill is essential because it is a window into the health and efficiency of your operations. PMP TeamMate provides a complete set of tools to help you catalog downtimes and their causes, as well as automated reports. The way PMP TeamMate differentiates from other downtime logging and reporting tools is its capacity to analyze logs from an equipment standpoint and from a process standpoint
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Overall Equipment Effectiveness

Managing downtimes at the equipment level informs you on its performance and efficiency. It does not, however, offer any insights about how your downtimes affect your overall equipment effectiveness, hence the performance of, for example, planing as a process.

Overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) is used to measure the efficiency and effectiveness of equipment. OEE considers three factors: the availability and performance of your equipment, and the quality of its output.

Availability refers to the amount of time the equipment is available for production. This includes planned and unplanned downtimes, such as equipment maintenance, setup and changeovers, and unexpected breakdowns.

Performance refers to the speed at which the equipment is running compared to its theoretical maximum speed. Performance can be affected by factors such as operator skill, equipment design, and product specifications.

Quality refers to the amount of good products output by the equipment compared to the total amount of manufactured products. Quality can be affected by factors such as the raw material, equipment maintenance, and operator skill.

OEE = Availability × Performance × Quality

A perfect OEE score is 100 %, which means that the equipment is operating at full capacity with no downtime, producing good quality products at maximum speed. OEE is a better indicator of the performance of a process (e.g., sawing, planing) than equipment efficiency (although it’s important, too, for different reasons). 

PMP TeamMate offers a complete battery of tools and reports to help you do that.
Lumber coming out of a Comact ProGrader in a planer mill

Not Every Downtime is as Bad as You Think

While it’s important that your equipment be available all the time, not every downtime is necessarily catastrophic.

At PMP SOLUTIONS, we’ve discovered through 15+ years of experience that, based on the theory of constraints, as long as the primary constraining equipment on your manufacturing line continues to output at peak capacity and efficiency, any downtime up and / or down the line do not have as much impact on your process as a whole, than if they are looked at individually. The breaking point is when your primary constraint is affected or becomes a different piece of equipment.

With PMP TeamMate and its modules, you can analyze the causes of your downtimes, to what extent they affected your process, and pinpoint the causes or equipment that have the greatest impact on your OEE.

We’ve systematically observed that mills who correctly document and manage downtimes perform better by opening effective vertical communication channels that stimulate proactivity and reduce knee-jerk reactions.
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MANAGING DOWNTIMES WITH PMP TEAMMATE

The powerful PMP TeamMate tools help you go beyond simply cataloging downtimes—you can easily find improvement avenues in your sawmill and planer mill with our business intelligence tools. 
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Automatic downtime logging

One of the great advantages of our solution is that downtimes are logged automatically. It's even capable of pulling information out of equipment to determine causes—but equipment downtimes, as you can see, have little to no value because they give you no insight as to why they happened. You'll come to rely on PMP TeamMate downtime reports because they are actionable.

The precision that PMP TeamMate offers is (literally) unequaled in the industry. Behind their fancy interfaces, DIY and legacy solutions often rely on external sensors. Unlike them, PMP TeamMate collects data from the most reliable data point: the source.
Comparing PMP TeamMate and PLC downtime reports
Downtime analysis business intelligence report

Dig Deep with Powerful Business Intelligence Dashboards

Once you have data about your downtimes, you can use PMP TeamMate business intelligence dashboards to deep dive into downtimes to uncover trends and areas of improvement—all this backed by our 15+ years of experience ensuring the quality of your downtime information.

Your Analysis is Only as Good as Your Data

As the saying goes: garbage in, garbage out.

The quality of your data sources is crucial for business intelligence (BI) applications and artificial intelligence (AI) systems because it directly impacts the accuracy, reliability, and effectiveness of the insights BI / AI generate.

In BI applications, the quality of your data determines the success of the analytical process because they rely on this data to generate reports, dashboards, and visualizations that offer insights into the performance of your mill. If your data is incomplete, inconsistent, or inaccurate, the insights generated by BI software will be misleading, resulting in bad decisions and missed opportunities.

Similarly, for AI systems, data is the foundation for models. AI systems use machine learning algorithms to identify patterns and make predictions based on historical data. Again, if your data is incomplete, inconsistent, or inaccurate, your AI system will learn incorrect patterns and make inaccurate predictions, which can have significant consequences.

Therefore, it is essential to ensure that the data source used for BI applications and AI systems is reliable, accurate, complete, and representative of the problem being solved. Organizations need to invest in data quality and data governance practices to ensure that the data source is fit for purpose and can support the insights generated by these applications.

PMP TeamMate, unlike ANY other solution on the market, uses a data warehouse approach where data is processed and structured into a single scheme based on the ANSI / ISA-95 standard before going into the warehouse. From there, you can analyze the clean data in the warehouse.
Diagram of PMP TeamMate data structure

PMP TEAMMATE—GO BEYOND CONVENTIONAL REPORTING. PUT YOUR DATA TO WORK

PMP TeamMate is the operating system for your wood transformation business—whether it’s a single or multiple-mill operation. It's a complete operating system for your mill—each module of PMP TeamMate can be used individually or in any combination, but they are all designed to offer you the information to get more out of your mill and the people who work in it, because our solution is your teammate.
Helps you know precisely what comes into your sawmill, if it’s optimal for your recipes, if what goes out is off-sized and why, and much more. Finding out before the wood is in the yard can be the difference between a successful run and one full of lower grades.
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Helps you monitor and analyze planing performance, kick starting effective bidirectional communication between management and operations to drive the best possible results, improve over time, and maximize the value of your products.
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Drying wood, especially in kilns, is an essential part of wood transformation and, after sawing, key to obtaining quality products. PMP WeDry helps you more effectively control moisture content, optimize kiln operations for wood that's more standard going into planing.
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PMP WeTrack offers you a clear, concise, and complete understanding of your inventory at all stages of manufacturing, which helps you seize opportunities as they crop up and is crucial to move your wood more profitably.
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With PMP WeSchedule you can bring it all together, streamlining operations according to current market needs, available supply, up-to-date production, and order backlogs. You’ll then be able to move the right wood at the right time.
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Start putting your data to work . BETTER MOVE THE WOOD

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