The use of simulation and design of experiments for productivity improvement in the sawmill industry

This work presents a discrete event simulation model of an important sawmill in Chile. This model was used to perform a bottleneck analysis of the wood process and to propose, based on these results, alternatives that would yield to an improvement in the process productivity. Different alternatives were simulated and the results obtained were used to perform a full factorial design in order to select the combination of factors that have the most important impact in the process productivity. The implementation of these improvement measures could increase the wood production up to a 25%.