National Hardwood Magazine - September 2022

BID Group: Driving Solutions With Artificial Intelligence
AI Gains Consistency And More Through-Put On Grade
Mirabel, QC – While Artificial Intelligence (AI) was
founded as an academic discipline in 1956, its
various sub-fields of usage have required decades
of experimentation and have been implemented
with various tools in differing industries. The lumber industry
is no exception to that, with the BID Group leading
the way in AI development.
The privately-owned BID Group, established in 1983,
has been providing industry-leading solutions for its
highly valued customers in the wood processing industry.
BID is a leader in Operational Lifecycle Excellence,
transformational wood processing technologies, and integrated
solutions. It’s at the forefront of Artificial Intelligence
and Digital Solutions in the industry, empowering
customers to achieve their best overall performance.
BID Group is the umbrella company that owns a multitude
of brands, providing turnkey operations from the
ground up.
BID adds strategic value for its customers through its
ability to provide complete, smart-connected, turnkey
manufacturing systems that include engineering, project
management, equipment, software, installation, startup,
and after-sales parts and services. BID is dedicated to
delivering its customers superior performance, innovation,
remarkable service, and results through continuous
improvement of its products and services. The company
has offices in 18 locations with over 2,000 employees
throughout North America and is situated to serve its
BID’s GLC is designed to offer broad online learning options for
technologies-related content.
global customer base.
Here in Mirabel, the BID Group is building on the ever-growing
use of AI to enable businesses to improve
efficiency and productivity. This is not the first time BID
has been recognized for further developing technology
that can improve a company’s bottom line by enhancing
production. Comact, a brand of BID, was founded in
1924 and acquired by BID in 2013.
Comact began focusing on the softwood industry
when it debuted its first full grader with vision system
at a stud mill in Ontario. Later, in 2008, Comact’s first
edger optimizer for a Hardwood sawmill was installed,
and they knew they had developed a valuable product
Here are some of the BID team members who are dedicated to providing superior optimization products.
In the Hardwood industry, BID’s Comact TrimExpert (pictured) is the most commonly
utilized AI optimizer.
for the Hardwood side of the industry based on the results of the optimizer’s
performance.
Senior Vice President of Optimization at BID, Stephane Desjardins, said,
“In 2008, we completed a good project with a good outcome but quickly saw
that we had to put in more effort as there is always room for improvement.”
From 2008 to 2018, they installed more Hardwood and Softwood systems
and with each one, they found ways to improve as the industry evolved. “In
2018, we began work on our AI platform,” explained Desjardins. “Our first
test was wood species identification. You want to sort species because you
want to dry them differently. In the beginning, it was difficult to get over 80
percent of good detection, but then as we tried Deep Learning, within a few
weeks we were able to get to 98-99 percent detection. So, with that, we saw
opportunities with the AI system for both Hardwood and Softwood.”
He commented further that AI is “similar to the human brain in the way
it figures things out and the more times it is shown something, like a wood
defect, the more accurately it recognizes it each time. We have 30 wood
processing engineers who teach the system how to detect what is needed.
Each project is assigned a wood processing engineer, a software engineer
and a project manager.”
Patrick Lepage, Manager of Sales Support of the Optimization Group,
added, “Our wood processing engineers have either a bachelor’s degree in
forestry or wood technology. There are different levels of expertise on each
team, with some being more hands-on at the mill.”
“These guys are really the face of
the optimization team during startup.”
Anne-Marie Levesque, Vice
President of Digital Technologies
and Marketing, added, “The wood
processing engineers are part of
the preparation process and are
the ones training the customer, so
they are part of the whole project to
assist the customer before, during
and after startup so the customer
can take ownership of the machine.”
Sawmill product consistency is
a result of the optimization and AI
products developed by BID, too.
“A big value of our system is that
the machine gives you a consistent
product – every day, every time,”
commented Lepage. “With the ongoing
labor shortage, good graders
are hard to find, and human graders
can be very proficient at what
they do, or they can be average.
With our machine, the product is
stable. This consistency also gives
you greater flexibility.”
Desjardins concurred, adding,
“you can do proprietary grades on
the production line. For example,
if you put a new product down the
line, a human grader may find it difficult
to switch between products.
However, our systems are not challenged
by that.”
Please turn to page 46
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