Wood Panel
IDA Business AI
Panel Exporter Builds a Chain of Custody Its Buyers Can Audit
European buyers began asking for timber provenance the exporter held, but only across four systems and a filing cabinet.
Wood Panel · IDA Business AI
Plywood Maker Finds the Yield It Was Losing at the Press
Recovery was reported monthly against a standard assumption, so nobody could say which line, shift or log lot was losing the veneer.
3.1 pts
of recovery regained on the worst line
Per shift
yield reported, not per month
Log lot
as the costing unit end to end
The challenge
The mill costed every batch against a standard recovery percentage set years earlier. Actual recovery moved with log quality, season and press cycle, but it was only visible in a monthly reconciliation that arrived three weeks after the boards had been sold. When margin slipped, the argument was about whose number was wrong rather than about what had happened on the line.
Our approach
We made the log lot the traceable unit and captured output at the peeler, the dryer and the press against it. Consumption of glue, resin and power was booked to the same lot, so recovery could be calculated per lot rather than inferred. An agent watches the running yield and flags a line whose recovery drifts outside the band its own history sets, while the shift is still on.
The outcome
Recovery is now reported per shift and per line against the lot that produced it. The largest single loss turned out to be a press programme running an old cycle time on one of the four lines, which had never been visible against a plant-wide average.
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