Manufacturing wood products is not for the faint of heart. As if seasonal and economy-based demand variability weren’t enough, working with organic raw materials such as wood inherently leads to manufacturing process variability. Skilled workers and robust processes are needed to ensure sustainable operations despite thin margins in this highly competitive market.
This post explores the manufacturing challenges faced by wood products manufacturers and shows how SyncManufacturing® and the Master Item Planner module address these issues.
Wood Products Manufacturing Challenges
If you’re a production scheduler in the wood products industry, you know how challenging your role can be. No matter what the Master Production Schedule produced by your ERP system says, you no doubt spend hours adjusting schedules to real-world constraints, such as the quantity and quality of raw materials available, current workforce skills and availability, and the inevitable supply chain delays. Despite all your efforts, your production schedule can become instantly obsolete when things change, such as discovering that one of your raw materials shipments wasn’t up to the promised quality standards.
But the wood products production planner’s challenges do not stop there. As an example, take the challenge of manufacturing engineered wood products such as an LVL beam. LVL, short for laminated veneer lumber, is manufactured as a large panel often referred to as a “billet.” This panel is then cut lengthwise to achieve the desired height of the final product before being trimmed crosswise to the required length. Twenty or more finished products can be cut from one billet. The production planner’s challenge becomes how best to fulfill customer orders while minimizing material waste and maximizing plant capacity.
4 Steps to Minimizing Waste and Maximizing Resource Utilization
To help our wood products customers address this challenge, we added a feature called the Master Item Planner to SyncManufacturing. The Master Item Planner evaluates countless production scenarios against customer demand and identifies the most effective approach. From this optimized solution, SyncManufacturing generates a detailed plan, complete with electronic work orders.
Since most manufacturers we work with love details, let me dig a bit deeper into that process, providing more specifics on each of the steps:
Step #1 – Based on customer demand, SyncManufacturing generates order suggestions based on desired inventory levels and minimum order quantities. This step is not unique to wood manufacturers. Aggregating customer demand into order suggestions is a fundamental function of SyncManufacturing Advanced Planning and Scheduling (APS).
Step #2 – Here’s where the Master Item Planner addresses the unique needs of wood product manufacturers. SyncManufacturing determines the optimal billet size as well as rip (lengthwise) and cut (crosswise) operations needed to produce the finished products most efficiently.
Step #3 – While SyncManufacturing automatically generates optimized production schedules, no one knows their business like production planners and schedulers do. Once they’re happy with the production plan, they tell SyncManufacturing to generate the electronic work orders necessary to execute it.
Step #4 – Lastly, SyncManufacturing schedules the electronic work orders, optimizing changeovers, batching, and material flow through the plant.
“SyncManufacturing’s Master Item Planner has enabled us to schedule our plant operations more effectively, reducing changeovers and minimizing waste. We appreciate Synchrono’s efforts in building this tool.”
Ryan West, Scheduling and Optimization Manager, SIOP at Roseburg Forest Products
4 Benefits of Master Item Planner
Master Item Planner helps wood products manufacturers optimize their operations and achieve greater productivity and production efficiency. Let’s dig a bit deeper into these key benefits.
Minimize material waste – By evaluating all possible options, the Master Item Planner creates a low-waste plan that ensures materials are used most effectively. The Master Item Planner can also be configured to meet the needs of individual facilities, such as prioritizing filler products based on historical demand, preferring certain billet lengths, or focusing on full bundle or unit sizes of finished products.
Maximize plant productivity – Because the Master Item Planner creates electronic work orders and aggregates customer demand into stock order suggestions, plant productivity can be calculated and forecasted. Instead of booking to approximations of capacity, like linear or cubic feet, SyncManufacturing can direct the sales team to book new orders directly against machine hours.
Increase production efficiency and agility – Instead of manually determining plans using spreadsheets and institutional knowledge, the Master Item Planner can calculate a plan in seconds. The time difference between tweaking a pre-made plan and manually creating a plan from scratch is significant. Automated production scheduling software also allows the business to be more responsive to last-minute rush orders from customers.
Improve workforce utilization and retention – Hiring and retention issues frequently come up in our discussions with customers. Production schedulers and planners are often seasoned employees with a lot riding on how well they perform their role. Standardized, automated production scheduling processes reduce burnout by making the planning and scheduling roles less stressful and making it easier for others to fill in. Standardized processes can also make it easier to onboard new people when current staff members retire.
See Master Item Planner in Action
We’re excited to introduce the Master Item Planner module within SyncManufacturing® and would like to thank Roseburg Forest Products for their support throughout the development process. Based on their input, Master Item Planner continues to maximize the value, such as reducing waste and maximizing manufacturing efficiency and productivity. For more information and to see the Master Item Planner in action, schedule a demo with one of our specialists.
