Description

SIA "Krauss" is the largest production company of birch lumber, furniture parts, and glued parts in Northern Europe. The company carries out a full processing cycle from round wood sawing to finished products

The goal of this project was to develop a beam-cutting optimization solution for sawmill processing birch beams. The solution should minimize waste, maximize the value of output and optimize the use of the raw material, increasing processing speed and precision.

"There were no analogues for our specific solution to the situation. Zippy Vision was ready to undertake the development of such a solution, realizing that the development of such a solution might require the development of a number of new solutions, the likes of which Zippy Vision had not yet developed. A possible alternative was to request the adaptation of existing solutions from known manufacturers. However, their price was disproportionately high and there were risks that the technical task we set may not fully correspond to the solution to the business problem.
We realized that Zippy Vision is a relatively new company with no experience in developing a specific solution. We took risks deliberately because the advantage of the choice was Zippy Vision's readiness to focus on the problem to be solved from the point of view of a business problem, aware that the search for technological solutions will have to be approached flexibly and that technological changes and adaptation are possible during the project.
Our choice was fully justified, as the solution was developed within the original budget.
We highly value Zippy Vision's technological expertise and are considering further opportunities for cooperation in other solutions, despite the fact that this project was delivered in six months, instead of the previously planned four months.
In addition, we received an advanced analytical simulation and modelling system, which allows us to model better sawing solutions with a higher yield of final material on historical data received from the machine on the configuration of real raw material.
Zippy Vision demonstrated high technical and technological expertise in the project, as well as Zippy Vision's desire to understand and solve the business task, adapting technical solutions accordingly when necessary."

Gatis Gulbis, Chairman of the board

Challenge

Rising prices of raw materials and increasing competition require a significant increase in the efficiency of the use of materials and an increase in the output of a high-quality final product.

full use of technological improvements in the production process before and after the sawing process:

A new, more technologically advanced sawing process is needed, which would allow:

use the results of new, accurate digital log sorting technologies with a more accurate sawing technology adapted to them;

to use new post-processing technologies available today and expected in the future to recover material from hitherto ignored configurations of sawn material.

To use digital technology and data analytics capabilities by collecting historical data and to automate the search for optimal sawing solutions by modelling the impact of different sawing scenarios (configurations) on the final material yield with the possibility of looking for correlations between certain groups of log parameters and the impact of appropriate solutions.

Create a sawing system that analyzes each individual log and adapts to its configuration, thus reducing the need to re-set the equipment

Obtain full-value statistical data from the sawing process to be included in the unified enterprise data analysis process

Ensure that the scanning process not only accurately determines the 3D configuration, but also accurately identifies the bark using visual information

Solution

The laser triangulation and visual scanning system, which obtains complete log information and, using effective optimization algorithms, finds an individual and most valuable sawing solution for each log.

The optimization system evaluates the position of ~800 million final products on each log, looking for the best way of sawing according to the value of the final products.

The optimization includes conditions regarding the location of the various products relative to the core of the log.

Provide full process control and automatic material feed and saw control to ensure automatic solution execution and optimal log sawing.

Includes remote configuration and full statistics collection.

A solution modelling system that uses the collected full log spatial and visual data and allows the company to model the effect of different saw configurations on the potential output, choosing the best one and improving the sawing process and its output accordingly.

Use modelling and statistics generated at the machine log level to evaluate and search for new, more efficient material sorting technologies that would be specifically adaptable to other saw configurations.

Results

Increased yield of valuable products from the same raw materials. The total increase in material efficiency is at least 10% compared to the previous solution, which was based only on the geometric conditions of sawing.

The accelerated production process, minimized downtime

Sawing simulation software that allows you to model the effect of different saw configurations and log sorting parameters on the end result. The simulation uses real-life data retrieved from the scanning system.