Impact of Curve Sawing on Southern Pine Dimension Lumber Manufacturing: Part 4--Maximizing Economic Benefits‪.‬

Abstract This paper discusses how southern pine dimension mills with curve sawing can maximize the incremental economic benefits from curve sawing. A systems approach to do this based on an advanced linear programming technique with an external reconstruction algorithm was presented. With this, the study mill could enhance the expected incremental net revenue (INR) from curve sawing by about 40.8 percent (from $6,663 under non-optimal operating conditions to $9,382 under optimal operating conditions), based on a production level of 274 thousand board feet (MBF) per 8-hour workshift (i.e., 78.3 percent of the study mill's maximum productive capacity of 350 MBF). Such an increase is mainly the consequence of having a log input mix that has proportionately larger-sized logs with greater sweep severity. Also, the mill could further enhance its expected maximum INR by operating at a higher production level, i.e., at the average rate of $32.24 per MBF as determined by regression analysis.