Question 6 of 8: Techniques to Reduce Wood Cost

Question 6: Techniques to Reduce Wood Cost (20 marks)

Question text not reproduced: the examination questions are © Engineers and Geoscientists BC. Open the official past paper (linked at the top of this page) to read the question, then follow the worked solution below.

Four established techniques Canadian forest companies use to reduce delivered wood cost (CAD/m³), covering both harvesting and trucking as invited by the question, are described below. Because wood cost is fundamentally Machine rate (CAD/PMH) ÷ Productivity (m³/PMH) (Question 5), every genuine cost-reduction technique works by lowering the numerator, raising the denominator, or both.

1. Mechanization / system conversion (harvesting). Replacing a manual or partially manual system with a more mechanized one — the historic shift from hand falling with chainsaws to feller-bunchers, or the more recent shift from full-tree to CTL systems on suitable terrain — sharply raises productivity per person and per machine-hour, and reduces the labour-cost and safety-risk exposure that manual falling carries. The tradeoff is a much higher capital cost per machine, so the technique only reduces CAD/m³ where stand volume and terrain are sufficient to keep the mechanized unit's utilization, and hence its amortized fixed cost per cubic metre, low.

2. On-board machine-activity monitoring (FERIC MultiDAT / FPInnovations FPDat), and the shift-scheduling decisions it justifies. The MultiDAT named in the question is a small, rugged data logger that FERIC developed to be bolted onto a harvester, skidder, forwarder or log truck, where it senses engine state, vibration and movement and automatically classifies every scheduled hour as productive, idling, travelling, or stopped — continuously, on every machine in the fleet, with no observer riding along and no operator paperwork to be filled in or forgotten. Its successor, the GPS-equipped FPDat, adds position so that cycles, skid/forwarding distances and mill-queue waiting can be reconstructed as well. The technique reduces wood cost indirectly but powerfully, because it replaces the operator-reported hour sheets on which utilization figures were traditionally based — which systematically under-record short delays — with a measured, machine-by-machine record of where the scheduled hours actually go. That record is what makes the other techniques on this list targetable rather than speculative: it identifies which machine is the real bottleneck (Question 3), it quantifies the utilization term in the machine rate (Question 5), and it exposes the specific recoverable delays — waiting on a skidder, queuing at the mill scale, long unproductive moves between blocks — that a manager can then act on. The commonest such action, and the one the question's "harvesting or trucking" scope invites, is extended-shift (multi-shift) operation: once the data show a high-capital harvester or truck is idle for much of the calendar day, running it over two shifts instead of one raises annual productive machine hours without adding a dollar of capital, because ownership cost (depreciation, interest, insurance) accrues with calendar time rather than with the number of shifts that use those hours. Spreading the same annual fixed-cost total over roughly double the productive hours lowers the fixed-cost component of CAD/PMH substantially, and flows straight through to a lower CAD/m³, provided a second qualified crew and adequate lighting and safety provisions are available.

3. On-board computer / GPS bucking and block-planning optimization. Modern CTL harvester heads carry computers (recording data in the industry-standard StanForD format) that measure each stem's diameter profile in real time and automatically select the bucking pattern that maximizes recovered value against current mill price lists — a direct process-improvement technique that raises the effective value (and, by extension, the usable volume) recovered per PMH without changing the machine's hourly rate at all. The same GPS/GIS technology applied at the planning stage — optimizing road and cut-block layout to minimize skid/forwarding distance and road-building length — reduces both the extraction machine's cycle time (raising productivity) and the capital cost of road infrastructure (lowering fixed cost) simultaneously.

4. Preventive-maintenance and utilization-management programs (harvesting and trucking). A scheduled preventive-maintenance program, rather than a run-to-failure approach, reduces unplanned breakdown downtime, which directly raises utilization (PMH/SMH) for both woods equipment and the trucking fleet; centralized truck dispatch and scheduling software applies the same logic to hauling by minimizing empty backhaul and waiting time at the mill weigh scale, raising trucks' productive hours per day. Because CAD/PMH's fixed-cost component is inversely proportional to utilization, this technique lowers wood cost purely by using assets already owned more of the time, with no new capital investment required.