The usual culprits of low material yield are the log diet, sawing recipes, and sawblades. Unfortunately, you can only look at them once you notice a problem and the damage is done.
A sawmill is essentially a large machine consisting of several thousand moving parts, operated by many, many people more or less all the time. High automation is a key feature of this machine, but despite operational technologies (OT), information technologies (IT), and the industrial Internet of things (IIoT), many of the line’s operations are still performed by people.
These people work hard every minute of every shift to do a good job in a full-immersion workplace. When things go south, staff literally climb in and around equipment pulling, turning, fixing, replacing, and sweating to get the line working. When that happens, performance indicators handed down from the corporate office aren’t all that relevant. If you want to improve as a business, you must engage with the people at all levels to make sure that improvement plans are developed, measured, reported, and acted on by the right people at the right place, time, and way.
With PMP TeamMate™ and, more specifically, PMP WeSaw™, you can, in only a few clicks, set up meaningful dashboards that speak to operators in the mill.
It’s really easy to measure just about everything in a sawmill. With thousands of transactions occurring every instant, however, it’s easy to get lost in the details—some performance reports run page after page of detailed data because someone (usually higher up) wants to see a regular report on a microscopic aspect of mill operations. This collection of numbers may look impressive and very important, but upon closer inspection most numbers in reports like this turn out to be quite useless to those who need to act on them to improve some aspect of mill performance.
By having contextualized data from OTs, it’s much easier to set KPIs and objectives that are relevant and (especially) achievable by everyone in the mill. By tapping into the power of IIoT and plugging it into strategic and operational planning with software like PMP TeamMate™, you can churn out actionable business intelligence and KPIs that are meaningful and engaging for everyone in your smart factory.
