The flow of lumber through the plant is the lifeblood of a component manufacturing business, so taking steps to protect and improve that flow is essential for keeping your business healthy. This is an objective we took to heart when creating our JAX system.
With JAX, The Wood Retriever, a shop floor organizer, and the JAX-Universal Compiler (JAX-UC), we have a complete material management system that will track your inventory in real time. The knowledge you gain will allow you to continuously optimize your plant operations.
For example, the Bunk Manager screen displays the entire bunk-to-saw material flow and yields better inventory management, optimized cutting, and control over material substitutions. The Bunk Manager can display 33 color-coded SKUs that are available for lumber picking. The fastest moving items are positioned close to one of the three lumber conveyors that service the saws. If a plant stocks more than 33 SKUs, bunks of the least-used materials can be stocked outside of JAX, near either end of the gantry line, so that they may be swapped into and out of JAX without disrupting JAX from picking in other safety-curtained zones.
In addition, the Bunk Manager screen shows the status of the saw shop, with quantities On Hand, In JAX, and Required.
The diagram shows the following example for jobs in the queue [for images, See PDF or View in Full Issue]:
- Job 241388 is the next to be picked, needing 12’ 2x4 #1 SYP
- On Hand: 5664
- In JAX: 91
- Required: 24
- Job 241388 was picked, using 7 18’ 2x4s and 8 2x10s
- This job is on the conveyor from JAX to the ALS saw.
Having live displays of material levels on large screens in the production office alerts managers when SKUs need to be replenished. These screens also tell sawyers what batches are currently being conveyed to them and they advise truss designers of the optimal lumber lengths that they should use to splice truss chords.
Bunk Manager is a key management tool, but it is just one aspect of the entire JAX-UC software system. JAX-UC begins by reading batch cutting files and converts them to a common format. Then JAX-UC compares job requirements to available inventories. Finally, JAX-UC communicates movements to the Sage hardware. In fact, JAX-UC can automatically upgrade lumber when lower grades run out. In the process, JAX-UC is a visually rich, perpetual inventory system for a truss plant, enabling better control of the material that constitutes 40%–50% of the cost of a truss.
What’s best about this system is that you don’t have to change anything about the way you currently send cutting to your saws! In my plant, I have an Alpine ALS, a Monet DeSauw DeRobo, and a MiTek Blade, but JAX is happy to feed ANY saw. When you want to learn more about this great new system and JAX, the Wood Retriever, please reach out to me.