Article by Marcello Lirusso, Applications Specialist,
Caterpillar Forest Products Global Solutions Team
We all want to maximize the time we spend on activities we like and limit time we spend on tasks we don’t like. The best way to do this is to improve efficiency. Take grocery shopping. If you plan your route before hand so your trip is systematic and travel times are streamlined, you could reduce your grocery shopping “cycle time” and spend the time you save with your family.
A logging operation is no different. The key to improving your bottom line is efficiency—reducing cycle times and streamlining tasks that are necessary but don’t add to profit. For example, with a feller-buncher, the value-added task is cutting trees; while maintenance, fueling and travel times are all non-profit making tasks.
Start by documenting your typical day and timing your tasks (e.g. leave house, stop at fueling station, arrive on site, start machine, fill machine, grease machine, travel, cut, etc.).
Then take the items and group them into a handful of buckets (e.g. commute, daily maintenance, harvesting, skidding, loading, etc.). Understand how long it takes to perform the tasks in each bucket. Let’s say you find that daily maintenance on your loader takes an average 45 minutes: 15 to grease, 10 to clean windows, 10 to blow out radiator, 5 to check oil levels and 5 for a general inspection.
Once you know your cycle time for a task and how long each step takes, you can look at areas for improvement. Maybe you find that if you added a power grease gun, kept it in the cab and greased just after lunch when the grease and the machine were warm, you could save five minutes a day. And you could bring spares of high-risk hoses to the woods and save 15 minutes a week.
These incremental changes can make a considerable difference by the end of the year. Just saving five minutes a day over 50 weeks (five day work week) equals approximately 21 hours of increased production time. Now add in the time saved by having spare hoses (12.5 hours) and you’ve got 33.5 hours of increased production. You don’t think of five minutes as significant until you look at a whole year and see that you’re adding almost a week of production.
The same goes for the harvesting process. Once you have broken down the cycle times for bunching, skidding and loading, analyze them and try to reduce. Here are tips to consider for improving machine cycle times:
- Look at travel times for harvesting equipment, especially track-type machines. Unnecessary travel time is very expensive due to undercarriage replacement costs and production loss, as travel speeds tend to be slower.
- Plan your cut ahead of time. Take a few minutes to walk the tract. You can assess ground conditions and terrain much easier on foot.
- Avoid unnecessary trips for fueling. If you are cutting close to the landing and have half a tank, fill up. If you don’t, you know you’ll need fuel when you are cutting at the furthest point from the landing. You’ll have to track back to fill up and all the way back to where you were cutting.
- Work at having your harvesting machine about a day ahead of your extraction unit to keep the wood flowing smoothly. If you are cutting in a mixed stand and the feller-buncher doesn’t have a buffer between what is cut and what the skidders are dragging, you can have a situation where there may not be enough of a particular species on the ground to fill a truck. With the truck driver waiting, the buncher has to find and cut more of the species needed to finish the load rather than harvesting systematically.
- Always keep your cutting edges sharp. Dull edges reduce your cut cycle times, can damage saw disks and cost you extra money in increased fuel consumption. Dull feller-buncher saw teeth can increase fuel consumption as much as 15%.
- Invest in appropriate equipment. For example, tire chains can help reduce skidder and feller-buncher cycle times by increasing traction and reducing the need for the feller-buncher to move trees to an area that is accessible to a non-chained skidder. The same is true for floatation tires.
- The quickest way to the landing is not always a straight line. The path of least resistance is likely the fastest. For example, you’re the skidder operator on the front face of a steep hill and the landing is at the top. You could claw your way to the top or you could go down the hill and around to an area less steep, traveling further but getting to the landing quicker.
- Optimize skid distances to eliminate unnecessary loader moves and road building, but know at what point a move is worth your time. You need to understand your cycle times, so when your skid distances get over a certain point you know you’ll make up the lost time moving with quicker skidder cycle times.
- Have appropriate maintenance tools on site as well as replacement fluids and parts for components more likely to fail (hoses, seal kits).
- Post performance metrics for employees. Keep score. This provides the employees the opportunity to see their improvements and ignites their competitive spirit.
- Use technology. In the past. measuring cycle times, machine down time and production levels was done manually with stop watches, weigh scales and tape measures. Today there are affordable telemetric systems that can provide most of this information through onboard computer systems. Having this information at your fingertips is worth the investment.
If you’re not measuring and understanding what you’re doing, you’re not able to focus on improvements that will help you be more efficient and add to your bottom line. Then set a schedule for review. If you are not consistently reviewing, you don’t know if your changes are effective. That’s the whole thing.
Caterpillar’s Global Solutions Team works with loggers and mill operations to improve the bottom line by analyzing the total cost of operations and recommending improvements.