Performance Excellence in the Wood Products Industry - A Publication Series

The forestry and wood products specialists in Oregon State University's Extension Service continually work with manufacturers in key areas including:

• Wood Technology - Wood anatomy and structure, silvicultural impacts on wood quality
• Operations Research - Linear programming, simulation, and modeling
• Production Management - Lean manufacturing, plant layout and design, production scheduling
• Quality and Process Control - Total quality control, lumber size control, statistical process control
• Marketing and Business Management - Pricing, promotion, sales, environmental marketing

Findings and recommendations are in a new series, Performance Excellence in the Wood Products Industry. Reports are written for busy managers -- they're in clear, everyday language, and they emphasize the practical. For readers who want to know more about the topic, each report also includes references to other sources of information.

The following titles are currently available (Note: All publications are in Adobe pdf format). To order hardcopy versions of any of the publications listed below, click here.

• Operations Research
  • An Introduction to Models and Probability Concepts
  • Using the Graphical Method to Solve Linear Programs
  • Using the Simplex Method to Solve Linear Programming Maximization Problems
  • Using Duality and Sensitivity Analysis to Interpret Linear Programming Solutions
  • Transportation Problem: A Special Case for Linear Programming
  • Simulating a Manufacturing System: An Introduction
• Quality and Process Control
  Statistical Process Control (SPC)
  • Part 1: Introduction to SPC
  • Part 2: How and Why SPC Works
  • Part 3: Pareto Analysis and Check Sheets
  • Part 4: Flowcharts
  • Part 5: Cause-and-Effect Diagrams (in progress)
  Lumber Size Control
  • Part 1: Measurement Methods
  • Part 2: Size Analysis Considerations
• Marketing and Business Management
  • Sources of Market Information for the Forest Products Industry
  • Sales and Understanding People (series brochure)
  • Personal Selling (series brochure)
  • Developing and Maintaining Customer Contacts (series brochure)
  • The Sales Presentation (series brochure)
  • An Introduction to Forest Certification
  • Oregon Wood Products Marketing Directory (in progress)
• Wood Technology
  • Tree Growth, Forest Management and their Implications for Wood Quality
  • Wood and Moisture Relationships
  • Air- and Shed-Drying Lumber
  • Identifying Common Northwest Wood Species: A Woodworker's Guide
  • "Wood.xls" - An MS Excel program to estimate shrink/ swell in wood, calculate equilibrium moisture content given temperature and relative humidity, and to estimate density given specific gravity.