By: Patrick Dumont & Todd Buchanan
With a big push on to improve recovery, quality and production efficiency company wide, Canfor selects Prince George Sawmill as a pilot site for the SiCam™ RealTime Lumber Size Control System. Randy Kubberness, Division Manager at Prince George Sawmill, says: "We are continuously assessing various technologies and best practices to improve on-size performance in our operation. Measuring lumber at PG sawmill was very difficult and time consuming due to the layout of the mill. We could never measure the required amount of pieces to be confident in lowering our target sizes. When our continuous improvement team brought forward the SiCam™ System as a viable project with a strong payback, we decided to go for a mill-wide solution. Our main objective was to scan every sawline right at each machine center to ensure we detect every event of miss-manufacturing. There are large surge areas before our edgers and before the trimmer. Eliminating miss-manufactured lumber at the source is critical to maximizing the financial impact of size control technology. The ability to accurately track the performance of each sawline separately should not be underestimated. It is probably the most important feature of a real-time lumber size control system and it was the primary driver behind our decision to go with SiCam™."
Canfor Prince George Sawmill produces 350 million foot board feet of domestic dimension random length SPF 2x4 and 2x6 products each year. With a small top average log diameter of 7.1" and processing beetle killed stems, being a low cost producer is a big part of the formula for ongoing success. Neil Morris, Sawmill Production Superintendent, says: "The SiCam™ size control system is part of our ongoing focus on continuous improvement in three key areas: recovery, grade outturn and production. For our size control project, we carefully assessed various options in the market and conducted mill tours to view the technology. SiCam's MPP (multiple piece profile) scanner solution for the bandsaw and circular quads, VDAE and VSS gangs and our multi-board edger was the right technology for these types of machines. We also installed laser scan zones for chipped cants, the board edger, and the trimmer multi-stage fence. At the planer infeed we installed a SiCam™ laser scanner to track shrinkage which is critical on lumber from beetle kill logs."
Patrick Dumont, Continuous Improvement Coordinator, says: "With so much information we have far greater reliability and capability to make the best decision. With SiCam™ we know exactly which cutting tool is miss-behaving. The result is we often change one saw, instead of all the saws, saving precious production minutes. On our quads, changing one saw takes 7 minutes while changing all the saws takes about 15 minutes."
Todd Buchanan notes: "The information from SiCam™ drives action, from action comes results and then confidence builds. Confidence is increasing that there is much better control over sizes in the PG sawmill. This is evident from the target size reductions that have been approved and executed. I take my hat off to PG's personnel, they have moved on opportunities very quickly. On canter #1 the impact has been over a 3% recovery improvement and on canter #2 over 2% in the last two months. They've achieved the recovery improvements while increasing production and grade out turn at the same time. Impacts like this are exciting and people can't help but get charged up."
Nick Barrett, Project Engineer at SiCam Systems says: "Canfor PG's people are among the best in the industry. The QC team is skilled and eager - they are already going after the opportunities. It usually takes the mill personnel 3-6 months before they get to the level that Canfor PG is at after two months. With the recent target size reductions and the way the mill floor teams use the system, they are certainly ahead of the curve in terms of implementation. This just makes the payback all that much faster. The maintenance team has been great to work with. As with every installation there have been tweaks to the physical set-up. These were all completed professionally and fast. We are impressed by Gord Burgess (maintenance superintendent) and his team. They have taken ownership over making sure the system gets installed properly. Randy Kubberness (mill manager) and Mark Feldinger (regional general manager) are very interested in this project. They have been in the mill and asking about the system, they see first hand how the mill personnel use it. We have been told that the PG sawmill SiCam™ project has a high profile in Canfor. Senior executives have been coming around to see the SiCam™ System and understand its impacts. With this level of interest and support throughout the company, we are very excited about the potential for success."
SiCam Systems Corporation designs, markets and supports the SiCam™ RealTime and SiCam™ Caliper lumber size control technologies. SiCam™ RealTime is installed in more than 30 operations and 200+ scan centers. The SiCam™ Caliper System is installed in over 125 sites in four countries. The SiCam™ name is widely known in the lumber industry as the premium lumber size control brand. SiCam Systems Corporation's team is internationally recognized as pioneers and leaders in the field of lumber size control and sawing center predictive maintenance. SiCam Systems Corporation is located in Surrey ( Vancouver ) British Columbia , Canada and it can be reached at:
