The leading sawmilling/wood processing magazine in Canada, focusing on leading edge technology in this ever growing sector from British Columbia to Newfoundland.
 
 
 

In This Issue

Canadian Forest Industries Magazine Cover

Canadian Forest Industries Now Includes the Content of Canadian Wood Products

A Solid FINNISH

Finland's modern sawmilling sector combines a passion for quality wood products with highly automated plants to make an impressive business model.

by Scott Jamieson

The Helsinki bar has gone deathly quiet. With the exception of a table full of Canadians in the corner, the patrons are not happy. Just minutes ago Finland's national hockey team had drawn within a goal of Team Canada by scoring two quick goals midway through the third period. Hopes of a comeback were high, but with five minutes to play and a Finnish defender draped across his back, Rick Nash has just slid a beautiful backhand past Keri Lehtonen to ice Canada's 4-2 gold medal victory in the 2007 IIHF World Championships. This is a hockey nation, and 20,000 fans had assembled in downtown Helsinki to watch the final game on massive screens. As they make their way home waving Finnish flags, it becomes clear that this proud nation doesn't like to lose.

Watching this gold medal game with Canadian and many more local fans was a fitting end to a week-log tour of Finnish sawmills. Yet while Canada may have taught Finland a thing or two about getting to the puck first on this particular day, there is no doubt that we can learn more than a few things from this Nordic nation of just over five million when it comes to another mutual passion - Sawmilling. Our sawmill tour was hosted by the Veisto Group, HewSaw Machine's parent company. The well-oiled event saw Canadian and US sawmillers from some well known and respected companies touring eight modern sawmills and a couple of reman plants in southern Finland. Canadian Wood Products Magazine was privileged to tag along for the ride, and here is just a brief overview of the many things that struck us as we headed back home.

Wood en masse

The first thing you'll notice in just about any Scandinavian sawmill is how much, and how well, wood is used. Mill or office, beautiful wood, the industry's claim to fame, is everywhere. There are several reasons for this, but the effect is always the same - Wow! As several tour participants noted, it's hard to grasp the impact all this wood has without seeing it first hand, so you may have to trust me on this - wood works. If we could learn only one thing from Finland's sawmillers, I hope it is this penchant for using wood in our industry's facilities.

Can I work here?

In fact, the wealth of wood and wood accents is part of the larger goal of creating a bright, healthy, positive and productive work experience. Most Canadian mills aren't even in the same century as Finland on this front, but as our mills increasingly struggle with recruiting and retention issues, we'd best start taking notes. For starters, walk through your mill near the end of a shift one day, and forget the production numbers for a minute. Breath the air, walk from station to station, listen to the noise, watch the faces of your workers, and maybe sit in your lunch room for 30 minutes. Would you want to work here; would you recommend it to your kids?

Do the same in a typical Finnish mill, especially one producing over 50 million bdft/yr, and you'll soon be looking for the HR department and an application. Here's a hint - you won't likely find either, as there is little turnover worth mentioning.

Modern mills here start with bright, well-lit environments, kept at a pleasant working temperature and basically dust free. Noise is well contained for the most part, and physical demands are low. Automation takes care of that, as do remote-control cranes, near perfect logs, and slick clean-up systems. Thanks to the latter, the mills are clutter free and clean, like most of the country in fact. Operator cabs are massive, climate controlled, clean, and well furnished - One we saw had furniture, work space and a suspended torrefied wood ceiling that would not have been out of place in a corporate boardroom. They sport high-quality colour monitors with images from clean cameras. Basically, take the better operator cabs you've ever seen in a Canadian mill, and you approach the average we saw in Finland.

Cafeterias are for the most part modern, serving hot food and yes, beer on occasion. Employees more often than not sport clean, impressive uniforms that would blend in well with an F1 pit crew. Sawmilling is a serious business, and employees are treated seriously as well. Still, don't expect a wide grin from any of the operators to prove how happy they are - It is not the Finnish way. They let their actions speak for them, however, by staying put for decades. Predictably, when one of the tour participants from Alberta asked a sawmill manager about turnover, he was treated to a blank stare. When the term was further explained in Finnish, the answer was short and sweet - "We don't have any."

Robot Mills

It is easier, and possibly more important, to treat employees well when you only have a handful to start with. That was the case at every mill we stopped in - machinery working hard, while a handful of employees looked on. Typically, the production line from the start of the log infeed deck through debarking, all the way back to the green chain lug loader was staffed by a grand total of one operator, and not a particularly stressed one at that. Add one operator at the grading and/or trimming station, and a third at the stacker-sticker placer, and you have a basic sawmill production shift. Forget bin chasers, debarker operators, rovers dealing with 90-degree turns or jackpots. Everything just keeps moving; slower than Canadian sawmillers may be used to, but relentless nonetheless. Many factors large and small conspire to make low staffing possible. These include:

  • Picture perfect logs with minimal defect and no rot. It's easier to be a true factory with predictable, consistent raw materials.
  • Clean up systems that require no intervention, like ubiquitous scraper chains under log decks, circulating conveyors at the end of belts to deal with overflow, engineered dust conveying systems, etc.
  • Manicured transfers and 90-degree turns. If something is causing a jam, it is re-engineered rather than tolerated. As one tour participant noted, "I'd have to have a man at almost all those 90 degree turns."
  • Remote control cherry pickers at key locations, allowing the operator to unblock jams while the line moves on.
  • CCTV cameras everywhere.
  • Board diverters and dealers that run automatically like clockwork.
  • Millyard logistics, including hectares of pavement and workflows that keep everyone hopping, yet no one waiting.
  • Automated grading systems (FinScan) in saw and planer mills.
  • Fully automated sticker reclaim and feeder systems, right down to even-ending or butterfly gate systems to tidy up sticker piles ahead of the singulators. Small touches at some mills include rounded edges on the stickers so they always lay flat.
  • Overhead slider-cranes that allow one man to move fresh cutting tools in and worn ones out, alone, safely, and with ease.

In short, if there is an opportunity to reduce handling and smooth out the flow, it is seized. There are many ways to measure productivity other than feet or lugs per minute. Logs here are very valuable, at $65 to well over $100/m3 delivered depending on size and grade. This makes value recovery at least as important as volume recovery or production speed. Still, good-sized dimension logs were fed through at a pace of over 1,000 per hour on most of the lines we saw, with minimal gaps, set cutting patterns, and consistent production compensating for feed speeds that are typically 150 m/min or lower.

Despite ribbon feeding and pattern cutting, there is more optimization than many Canadians would suspect. Full-profile scanning and optimized rotation/log positioning is common, as is optimized sideboard placement and profiling. Many of the mills we saw, and all the larger ones, had SeeCon INx real-time size control, sometimes just after the canter, other times along the entire line. Of course, automated green lumber grading, optimized trimming and sorting is the norm, using for the most part FinScan (ScanWare) Boardmaster systems. Semi-automated (one grader) planer mill grading is also the norm, while moisture sorting is not - all the wood is fresh.

The end result of this and picture perfect logs is highly productive mills making little but gorgeous lumber. Measuring productivity on an MMbf per employee basis is always tricky from the outside, nonetheless some quick and dirty comparisons are possible. Assuming 1.5 MMbf/man-year as a solid target for a high end Canadian mill, the Finnish mills we saw are doing well. Most surprisingly, the smaller, low-production mills still manage low labour content. Including all production personnel, including yard, sawmill, planer or dry mill, and maintenance, the mills we saw ranged from 1.3 MMbf to almost 3.0 MMbf, with annual productions that ranged from 22 MMbf to as high as 300 MMbf. Of course, there are no bucking lines, but then the intricate log sorting systems and wide range of finished products to manage balances that out. Any way you slice it, these mills are competitive.

Makkara Logs

It means sausage in Finnish, but Makkara is also a good description of the fibre that Finnish sawmills get to play with. Beautiful, defect-, and rot-free spruce and Scotch pine that look nothing like those we see here, all with little taper and few knots. Length and diameter accuracy is carefully monitored and calibrated in the bush. One mill stacked lumber right out of the HewSaw machine, using a slick board dealer to separate centre and sideboards, which went directly to stacker/sticker placers without trimmers or sorters, making the CTL harvester essentially the sawmill trimmer. Sawmillers pay for this quality, but it sure makes a day at the mill more pleasant.

Mills typically sort incoming logs into 40 or more bins according to sawing pattern using 3D log scanning systems (one mill had 122 log sorts, not counting species). In many cases it all starts with having a very wide range of final board sizes and lengths to choose from, including a lot of thin boards: The more board sizes to choose from, the more exact a pattern or side board profile can be found to fit the exact log being processed. The sawmill can then create a raft of wane-free lumber while still getting decent volume and excellent value recovery. The trade off is higher sawn lumber inventory, although little is sawn that is not spoken for.

The perfect and perfectly sorted log supply also means a high degree of raw material uniformity, something that any production process benefits from. Everything works better as a result, from ribbon-fed debarkers essentially debarking the same log divided into sawable sections, to step feeders and log turners that don't struggle with crook or knots. Of course a lengthy run of small or large logs presents challenges to the mill's back end, but that's not a bad trade off.

Products inside the patterns are often earmarked for specific end uses, and handled accordingly from primary breakdown on. Centre boards and sideboards are often kept separate through sorting and drying, with sideboards given the kid glove treatment in most cases. For example, we saw HewSaw's own board separator working in several mills, which uses a series of stops to gently lower the board onto the transfer belt.

Both the markets for the many different products and the supply of perfect logs have been developed over decades or generations, making this the one aspect of Finnish sawmilling that would be tough to emulate in the short term. Still, on the technology side, there is no shortage of North American sawmillers using HewSaw systems to handle some nasty material at higher speeds, such as Ledwidge Lumber's R200 Plus sawing larger, and far from pretty private wood at speeds over 550 fpm (see story in May 2006 CWP at www.canadianwoodproducts.ca), or the record breaking performance of Vaagen Bros. in Washington State.

Wooden Culture

Indeed the entire Finnish forestry culture would be a tough act to follow, but parts of it are certainly worth fostering on this side of the Atlantic. Any drive through the countryside reveals endless working forest, intensive forest management, active harvesting sites, and piles of slash ready for chipping and use as bio-energy. Forests are healthy, but they are being used, and the public does not have a problem with that. The Finns' love of high-quality wood products and wooden construction is evident both in Helsinki and across the countryside.

"The Finns have really figured out this wood thing," summed up Russ Vaagen of Vaagen Bros. as our bus rolled over a large-span bridge built with wooden trusses and sporting wooden light standards. The aggressive application of intensive forest management may be too widespread in Finland for our liking, and after a week you do long to see a natural forest. Yet we could blend a good deal of this in with our extensive management style, and perhaps both the pubic demand for biomass and the beetle crisis will allow us to do just that.

Logical Logistics

Regardless of the industry being served, you-ll likely see some different truck and trailer configurations doing the hauling in Finland if you keep your eyes open. Forestry is no exception.

CTL logs are brought to the mill in self-loading trucks with pup trailers, capable of handling five tiers of ready-to-mill logs. They are unloaded by the trucker directly on the log sort deck. Detachable loaders are also used at times to maximize payloads over longer hauls. Finished products may also move differently at times. Mills strap and wrap lumber for shipment, but some also leave the lumber unwrapped, loading it instead into trailers with cylinder-activated roofs, complete with roll down walls. Customers, typically reman operations, then get the lumber they want without wrap or staples to deal with.

Much of the mill yard work we saw was being done by independent contractors with flexible working arrangements and some very fast drivers. At one FinnForest mill, an empty sawdust truck rolled in, the driver hopped out, ran the Volvo front end loader like a pro, parked it neatly by the mill, hopped back in his rig, and peeled out, all in less than a few minutes - no muss, no fuss, no waiting. In fact, the cost of truck waiting time seems well understood here, with contractors going so far as to pre-arrange lumber loads before the truck arrives. Overall, our impressions of today's Finnish sawmilling sector were no doubt coloured by a European lumber market that has been smoking hot for over six months. Everything looks better and runs smoother when you're making fistfuls of money. Yet if you want to know where we may be heading with our labour shortages, cost issues, and growing product differentiation, you could do worse than spend a week in Finland. And if you need to know the word for goal, it's Mali. Just say it very quietly when Canada scores.

Editor's note: It was indeed a privilege to tour through Finland with a great group of sawmillers from Canada and the US, to discuss some of what we saw after each visit, and share some of their passion for the wood products business. These discussions form part of this report, and I'd like to credit and thank the folks involved from such outstanding sawmilling and consulting companies as Adams Lake Lumber (BC), Manning Diversified (AB), Plum Creek (Montana), Seneca Sawmills (Washington), Spray Lake Sawmills (AB), Stolberg Engineering (BC), Vaagen Bros. Lumber (Washington), and Weyerhaeuser Canada (AB). Kiitos, and of course, Makkara!