Another Nail in the Sawmill Coffin
Everyone has good days and bad days. Today was a bad day for me. No, I’m not ill, but I received some very bad news from a friend. He’s not ill either, but he told me there’s soon going to be a lot of upset people in local sawmill communities. There are rumours going around that a few mills may be closing. I don’t know where they’re located, but I know it will be unpleasant. The question we must always ask ourselves when faced with a failing business is “Why?”
I can speculate all I want about the reasons behind a mill’s closure, but it comes down to one thing: economics. Yes, this term has been flying around for decades and has been used to justify a wide range of decisions, from closing a business to releasing employees. I use the term ‘releasing employees’ after going through firing, terminating, send packing and some other words. I figured ‘releasing’ would have the least amount of emotional response, though delicate language cannot disguise the life-changing turmoil this causes for many families. But, the cause at the centre of all of this is still economics.
I must digress for a minute and tell you a story.
We had a piece of equipment in my machine shop serviced about eight months ago. The machine had been working perfectly fine for several years, but just like the parts of your car, they require regular service and maintenance. The service technician noticed some sparking on one of the components… after he was poking around in it.
Okay, this is where the story turns unpleasant.
The machine was immediately taken out of service for safety reasons. A necessary evil, but it’s not like I had a spare of this giant thing sitting around, ready and waiting to jump into the production line. My objective was to get this critical machine up and running again as quickly as possible.
Well, it did. But it took eight months!
Yes, eight months. Let that sink in. Is that an acceptable timeframe for a vital piece of equipment to be out of service in your machine shop, or sawmill.
Now this is where the story takes an even more dismal turn.
The service company wanted payment for the repair call that started this whole thing before they would send us back the fixed piece of equipment. I don’t think I’ve ever seen my face quite the same shade of tomato.
I couldn’t believe they wanted to be paid first, before they’d send our machine back. The nerve!
As you can tell, the wound is still fresh in my mind.
But, getting back to the potential closure of a few sawmills, and the economics at work. Remembering how upset I was about my equipment being out of service for eight months, I started to think about a sawmill in trouble. Some mills run poorly for years before they eventually shut down. Yes, years!
My own ordeal was only eight months by comparison, and it was completely unacceptable for my business. I can think of another word to describe it too. It’s eight letters, starts with B and ends with ULLSHIT.
I can’t imagine enduring a severe productivity issue, such as malfunctioning equipment, for years. Unfortunately, many sawmills regularly endure this for months or even years: a problem everyone can see and that is never properly dealt with.
There are many reasons those problems stick around in a sawmill, from just plain ignoring the problems, or because only minimal fixes are made in an effort to save a few dollars. Eventually, economics will catch up. When that happens, “Surprise!”, the sawmill is shut down.
Ignoring things that need to be fixed, or cheaping out on those fixes, only delays the inevitable. The mills that close are the weak ones that can’t seem to ever conquer their problems. If you’re in the sawmill industry, you know the weak ones.
In my case of the broken machine, I was crushed that I had to wait eight months for it to be fixed. I felt like my business was in limbo while this was going on. Many sawmills are too weak to make it out of their limbo state, or have been in a downward spiral for so long, they reach a point where they can no longer stop it once they’re dealt a critical blow.
I believe you can always turn a business around with the right solutions, and by doing everything in your power to prevent problems in the first place through maintenance, investment and innovation.
So next time you make a business decision, ask yourself if you’re really just putting another nail in your future economic coffin.
Alliance Timber
8 年Well said mate. I personally think most businesses blame lack of performance on people and tend to overlook the need for continue machine maintenance and improvements. Sometimes it cost less to fix it than to continue and wait for a major breakdown to occur.
North American Sales Manager // VOLLMER of America Corp.
8 年very well spoken,"truly headaches made today not only effect the companies bottom line but rather the communities /towns future". Tough discussions are made day in and day out great hearing of your ordeal waiting on machinery.
Forest Products Specialist
8 年The very sad truth in forest products is the lack of housing starts. Yes we are up 12% this year. Look at the fundamental change in demand we are are slightly over 1M. We need to sustain 1.6M to get close to equilibrium of supply and demand to get prices up. When we do the big producers can produce lumber like spaghetti. When we were at 2.2M the mills buried us in production and crashed prices. On the distribution side it is very common to miss an order by 1/M. That is $25; yes $25 on a load of lumber that cost $10,000. That is total greed by the lumber yards. They don't let the distribution company make a decent return. So the distribution network tries to buy as cheap as they can. Thus driving down the sawmill profits. Mills overproduce and the lumber yards beat the hell out of the distribution network.
Marketing Manager & Executive Administrator at IDCON INC Implementation and Support of Reliability and Maintenance Management Consultants
8 年Good article. Goes back to the basics of maintenance work management