Time to sharpen your pencil. One thing you should be doing is keeping tract of your production. The easiest method I have come up with is to record all lumber taken from the mill. A layer count will work, with an approximate number of board feet. At the end of the day, count the lumber that is in the mill. Daily production will be the end of the day count, plus the lumber taken out, less the mill count in at the start of the day. Using these numbers, you can see how different sawing patterns can effect your production. You can also see the proportion of grade lumber vs blocking or pallet. This can be useful when comparing sawyers.

Another thing you should be paying attention to is your downtime. Downtime is a silent killer. By deducting downtime from your production time, then dividng the net time into your production, you can come up with a lost production figure. That is production that can never be replaced. The most important number you should have is the cost per minute to operate your mill. Vast amounts of information can be generated from this figure. for example, multiplying downtime by the cost per minute will give you a realistic idea how much it really costs. But, you should also factor in the lost profit due to lost production. I like breaking downtime into several categories. Equipment failure, employee caused, nails, and weather are just a few categories. If nails are creating problems, the amount of downtime multiplied by costs will tell you pretty close to how much they are costing you. As an alternative, a metal detector may give you that return on an annual basis.

You must realize that the headrig is supposed to be the bottleneck in any mill. Any slowing of the headrig will cause a decrease in production and an increase in production costs. Slowing may be caused by bottlenecks, excessive inventory ahead of the headrig, mechanical failure, personnel problems or log infeed. A ratio/delay study can help analyze movement. A ratio/delay study will help point to areas that need to be corrected to keep the headrig flowing as well as possible. These studies can easily be set up and administered to any production center. Several can be counted at the same time. A ratio/delay study consists of recording whether a machine is producing or is down because of some other event. Recording is done every minute for a series of 20 to 30 minutes. Several sessions should be recorded to get a general picture of your operations. One last thing to consider. One minute of downtime per day yields a total of 1/2 day of downtime per year. 10 minutes of delay per day yields one week of lost production or an increase of nearly 2% in your production costs.

| Value Added

| Services

| Forums

| Contact

| Calculators