Elmwood Reclaimed Timber Manufacturer Improves Sales by 10% with APS Solution

Elmwood Reclaimed Timber Inc., based in Kansas City, Missouri, manufactures and markets the highest-quality reclaimed wood products that adhere to standards embracing the company’s deep respect for the environment.

Elmwood is committed to efficient manufacturing of its custom products and assuring on-time delivery to customers. They sought to improve their current system infrastructure to streamline operations and synchronize demand and supply. With these priorities in mind, Elmwood began its digitalization journey by searching for tools that would complement its existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and shop-floor data collection system.

After evaluating many solution areas and products, Elmwood selected SIMATIC IT Preactor Advanced Scheduling (AS) solution to improve the synchronization of manufacturing processes, giving greater visibility and control to increase utilization and on-time delivery while reducing inventory levels and waste. In addition to leveraging specialized skills required to identify high-quality wood, Elmwood had to consider the complexities of accurate scheduling of its manufacturing operations.

All of Elmwood’s manufacturing is custom in nature. The company uses SIMATIC IT Preactor AS to help decide what to manufacture because the cutting of reclaimed wood requires consideration of specific data for accurate scheduling. Elmwood uses this data to help make predictive decisions and identify problems before they occur.

“In 2016, we saw the impact of SIMATIC IT Preactor AS on our systems, leading to an increase in sales of 10 percent and improvement in profitability through accurate visibility and effective resource utilization,” said Mark Callison, President, Elmwood Reclaimed Timber Inc.

Elmwood’s business challenges

• Improve on-time delivery to enhance customer experience


• Eliminate manual scheduling and firefighting due to short- term visibility


• Overcome scheduling limitations of existing ERP system

Elmwood’s keys to success

• Implement tight integration between SIMATIC IT Preactor AS and ERP systems


• Account for shop floor constraints like material, yield and changeovers in finite capacity schedule (FCS)


• Use SIMATIC IT Preactor AS to provide visibility and flexibility for rescheduling throughout the manufacturing process


• Improve responsiveness to customer demand changes

Elmwood’s Results

• Increased top line revenues in 2016 by 10 percent


• Increased production output without increasing headcount


• Improved on-time delivery

“SIMATIC IT Preactor AS exceeded expectations and became the key software that helped us expand our capacity and automation. SIMATIC IT Preactor AS moves the manufacturing shop floor,” said Connor Burns, Vice President of Production.

Find out more about how Elmwood approached their project, the details of the implementation, and their dramatic results. Read the case study .