Data-driven insights for closer customer collaboration
Metsä Fibre’s Timber Performance Analysis service offers new ways to deepen collaboration with sawn timber customers.
Text: Charlie Bass Photos: Metsä Fibre
The latest data-driven service in Metsä Fibre’s offering is Timber Performance Analysis (TPA). The goal of TPA projects is to combine Metsä Fibre’s data with the customer’s data to deepen the mutual understanding of both parties’ production processes and better identify their key needs and requirements. According to Metsä Fibre’s Development Director, Kaija Viljakainen , an example of a starting point for a TPA project could be a customer approaching Metsä Fibre to discuss rejects or waste on their production line. “The first step is a pre-study to identify what kind of data the customer collects and how it could be used to solve the problem,” she says. “If there is potential for collaboration within a formal project framework, our technical experts will visit the customer site to observe how their process works, and customers visit the sawmill where their sawn timber products are made to learn more about the process. We get a lot out of these visits because we can see how the timber is fed into the customer process, how it flows through and what the operators are doing.”
A shared interest in continuous improvement
Metsä Fibre and the customer then agree on the product to be tested and the number of production batches to include as test loads. Regular meetings are held throughout the project to discuss progress. Once the test runs are complete and the data is analysed, the two parties sit down to see what insights can be gained and to agree on the next steps. The typical length of a TPA project is around six months from project kick-off to presentation of the final report. “With a TPA project, Metsä Fibre and the customer have a common goal and a shared interest in continuous improvement, and we can work together in a formalised way to achieve our aims. While production data is at the core of these projects, regular communication and open dialogue are equally important,” says Victoria Eklund , Technical Customer Service Manager at Metsä Fibre.
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