November 2005        Volume 79, Number 10

INOVEC, Taking Optimization To A New Level

By Wayne Miller

Eugene, Ore.--When a customer picks up the phone to call INOVEC’s service hotline, he knows that on the other end, a human voice will pick up the line, no matter the time of day or night.

“All of our customer service employees carry cell phones and can solve most issues 95 percent of the time without a mill visit,” said Kerry Wilson, INOVEC’s president. “If it gets to a point where we can’t help the customer over the phone, we can usually have someone at the mill within hours.”

Shown in INOVEC’s production facility are Tom Chambers, customer service manager; Milton Stahmer, engineering manager; and Scott Parvin, field engineer.

Manned around the clock by experienced product engineers and service technicians, the “live” hotline serves as a vital link between INOVEC and its customer base, which includes numerous Hardwood mills including Baillie Lumber and Coastal Lumber. These and other firms rely on INOVEC’s cutting-edge scanning, optimization and control systems to run their mills at the most efficient level possible.

Founded in 1979, 55-employee INOVEC maintains its headquarters in Eugene, Ore., and also has remote sales offices in Quebec, Ohio and North Carolina. The company was founded by Andrew Nowak who, as owner of hydraulic manufacturer Fluid Air Components, saw the opportunity in providing linear positioning technology to the lumber manufacturing process.

To get its feet wet in optimization for the Hardwood or “appearance grade” industry, where today it does nearly 80 percent of its business, INOVEC first approached Ram Forest Products in the late 1980s.

Kerry Wilson serves as president of INOVEC.

“They bought our first Hardwood edger optimizer for their new mill in Shinglehouse, Pa.,” Wilson stated. “We worked extensively with them both in the design and onsite to make sure our optimization solutions met National Hardwood Lumber Assoc. grading standards. Once we accomplished this goal, they said, ‘You’ve met the NHLA standards. Our customers need more, we need to exceed them,’ which we then did.  We took that as a lesson and, by building in plenty of flexibility to our optimization process, we have been exceeding our customer’s expectations ever since.”

“From there,” Wilson commented, “we developed optimization for all sawing machines in the mill, including gang edgers, trimmers, and headrig carriages. Any of our systems can be installed as a retrofit to existing machine centers or can be supplied as part of a package including new equipment.”

These INOVEC products include the WaneMaster G3 transverse edger optimizer, LineMaster G3 short-coupled lineal edger optimizer and the TrimMaster G3 trimmer optimizer, all of which use the firm’s patented G3 value-driven optimization software to produce the highest-quality, highest-value cutting solutions in the industry.

“Our edger and trimmer optimizers are designed to quickly extract the highest profit a mill can make from each board allowing a mill to optimize for value recovery in addition to volume recovery,” Wilson said.

Five years ago, INOVEC helped sawmill technology leap forward by introducing 3-D scanning to Hardwood mills with its StereoScan 3-D log scanner. With INOVEC’s YieldMaster headrig carriage optimizer, StereoScan provides powerful scanning, optimization and process control, all designed to meet the exacting needs of Hardwood mills.

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