Industry News News
New data and analytics service to deliver Southern Yellow Pine sawmill benchmark data

The partnership combines Beck’s sawmill benchmarking experience and knowledge with Forest2Market’s SilvaStat360 cloud-based interactive business intelligence platform. Sawmill TQ subscribers will have fingertip access to historic and current sawmill benchmark data that represents a large portion of the industry, is updated quarterly and available on a 24/7/365 basis, and lets mill managers focus on the key factors leading to their mill achieving Top Quartile financial performance.

Sawmill benchmarking allows mill managers to objectively identify competitive strengths and weaknesses and opportunities for improvement in key areas such as productivity, sales realization, log to lumber recovery and manufacturing costs.

“It’s a quite heady time to be in the sawmill business — especially in the South as an unprecedented amount of capital is flowing to sawmills,” said Pete Stewart, president of Forest2Market. “Sawmill TQ is launching at the perfect time to help mill owners and mill managers understand their competitive position in the South’s changing sawmill landscape.”

“Forest2Market has excellent data on fibre costs and lumber sales values and Beck has been benchmarking Southern Yellow Pine sawmills for more than two decades,” said Tom Beck, chairman of The Beck Group. “Combined, we offer unique data covering the whole Southern Yellow Pine lumber manufacturing chain, which we think will be very valuable for the industry.”

The Beck Group and Forest2Market are actively enrolling Sawmill TQ subscribers. The first quarterly release of data is scheduled for 3Q2018.

“Participating in Sawmill TQ is easier than ever,” said Bryan Beck, president of The Beck Group. “The last time we prepared a benchmarking study, participants spent hours manually filling out a workbook. Going forward, a straight data dump from current systems into a file that can be transferred to Beck is all that is required. Our goal is to make the process streamlined and simple, eliminating strain on resources.”

The Beck Group is a forest products planning and consulting firm located in Portland, Ore. In business for more than 35 years, the firm has consistently helped clients, ranging from the largest multi-national forest products industry corporations to small entrepreneurs, achieve better results (www.beckgroupconsulting.com).

Forest2Market, based in Charlotte, N.C., was founded in January 2000 to empower participants in the global forest, wood products, paper products, biochemical and bioenergy industries to make exponentially better decisions by providing unique datasets and analytics, and in-depth supply chain and market expertise (www.forest2market.com).