National Hardwood Magazine - January 2024

2024 EQUIPMENT/SERVICES FORECASTS Continued
Henry German
DMSi
Omaha, NE
Frances Cooper
Cooper Machine Company Inc.
Wadley, GA
We work with both Hardwood
and softwood companies.
The industry is still struggling
to get people to come
to work and we are selling
more sorters/stacking systems
to prove it. We expect
the trend of mills automating to continue into 2024. We
are also seeing labor has had inflationary pressures, especially
for skilled personnel.
Parts have stabilized a bit in being able to get them in
a more timely fashion, but prices remain high. Electrical
parts, specifically Allen-Bradley still have long lead
times. Importing/Exporting is getting a little better and
we are not seeing the delays due to lack of trucks and
drivers, like we were, but prices have remained more
costly than previous years.
Cooper Machine has been busy doing a good bit of
work with the post and pole industry to set up new merchandising
and sorting mills to get the posts and poles
ready to go into a perfect peeler or through the mill with
Morbark peelers. We are now offering a five saw chop
saw option with or without optimization for our customers.
We are also offering a pole grading system.
For the pallet industry, we are offering an optimized
Tandem with a special second saw to get the most out of
each log. This system works well with our inline splitter.
Adding a VSA and pallet trimmer to process the slabs
adds the cherry on top. We’ve teamed up with Brewer
and Precision Husky on a project here recently to provide
a complete pallet mill.
Cooper Machine has been teaming up with Automation
& Electronics for a lot of our PLC controls, and it’s
been a great partnership. We have found more customers
wanting to optimize their equipment to get the best
yield. We have an updated ultrasonic board that we are
starting to roll out to our customers. We will announce
when we are finished developing the updated controls
system to be rolled out to our existing customers. We
are also offering a simple PLC on some of our smaller
machines that we are doing in house.
Cooper Machine is best known for our long lasting
Scraggs. These are good for both Hardwood and softwood
customers and have different options to assist in
making pallet boards, chips, lumber, cants, mats and
crossties. Whether it be for small or large logs, we have
options. We also build merchandising and debarking
systems as well as sorting systems for both the Hardwood
and softwood industries. We have a new version of
our pole/post merchandiser/sorter system for softwood
mills that is more high production, which merchandises
up to six tree length logs per minute and sorts 24 posts/
poles a minute. We are also adding a classifying line
option to our offerings.
We are seeing that even smaller mills are wanting to
do more optimizing to help reduce the amount of labor
needed. This is why we continue to develop and offer
options for our customers to make this a reality. Merchandising
and sorting lines continue to be a popular buy
these days. b
Arianna Giudiceandrea and Norvin Laudon
MiCROTEC
Corvallis, OR and Vancouver, BC
We service both Hardwood and softwood
companies.
For Hardwood we observed high interest
in value-based log optimization with
the CT Log and expect this interest to increase
in 2024.
For softwood, we developed our own
hardware and production (e.g. cameras
and critical parts.) For the next 10 years,
we guarantee spare parts without any major
difficulties expected.
In the coming year we will offer the
Goldeneye lumber scanner for green, dry
and planer mills, and Lucidyne scanner
upgrades to softwood companies, and for
Hardwood companies we will offer value-based
log optimization with CT Log.
A new technology that we have introduced
to the Hardwood and softwood
DMSi offers a range of
software products to support
the building products industry,
from timber to consumer.
This includes a full ERP
solution with an integrated
CRM, log and lumber inventory
products, AI Hardwood
end tally system and a grading system.
Developed specifically for Hardwoods and softwoods,
our log and lumber solutions allow you to do more with
less. Workers can save time searching for material or
pallets when an automated system is presenting the information
right away. Full ERP systems make inventory
data considerably easier to track. Costing, inside sales,
and other administrative tasks can be automated to eliminate
manual efforts for your team. This means hours of
manual work can be cut down to the click of a button.
The DMSi product team is working towards incorporating
AI technology to provide information that will support
even faster and easier decision making to support your
day-to-day operations. There’s no question that technology
can ease the strain of labor shortages. For instance,
our computer vision grading system uses industrial cameras
and artificial intelligence to identify defects and automatically
assign grades to lumber. You would no longer
depend on someone to visually inspect the grade. Your
work will keep flowing through a staffing crisis.
At DMSi, we partner with customers to provide onsite,
customized utilization reviews. Our team improves
the efficiency of customers’ businesses and makes their
lives easier. b
industries is MiCROTEC Connect, a fingerprint
system based on CT-scanned
logs. Through the integrated scanner and
software solutions and MiCROTEC Ai
platform, logs can be traced from virtual
to real boards. We also have our MiCRO-
TEC Customer Care Center, a customer
support service that we are working to put
into place in 2024.
MiCROTEC offers scanning and optimization
solutions for the complete wood
processing industry, from logyard to secondary
processing, for Hardwood and
softwood - always committed to providing
our customers with the most economical
and sustainable wood utilization.
We see technology making up for the
shortage of labor through automation, digitization
and optimization. b
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JANUARY 2024 n NATIONAL HARDWOOD MAGAZINE 29