The final day of visits where we sailed over to Umea in Sweden to see Komatsu Forest, Volvo Trucks and Olofsfors
Today was an early start for Komatsu Forest as we had a four hour ferry journey from Vaasa to Umea to and as we arrived at the ferry terminal it became obvious that a few of the group members had been out sampling Vaasa’s nightlife.
It was a smooth and uneventful crossing the time went quite quickly as videos of our colleague’s singing prowess at some of Vaasa’s karaoke bars was starting to emerge and explained why so many had gone down with a 24 hour illness bug at the same time lol.
Once we arrived at Umea our bus was waiting, and we made our way in the snowy conditions to Komatsu Forest.
The new Komatsu forest factory was a remarkable sight and much bigger than I was expecting. Tim Bogatenko was waiting for us, and he was our guide for the visit.
Komatsu Forest was founded in Umea in 1961 and was originally known as Mekaniska. It was acquired by Volvo BM in 1976 and then Valmet in 1986, in 1997 it was bought by Partek and became known as Partek Forest until 2004 when Komatsu acquired it, and it became Komatsu Forest.
Since then, they have acquired Log Max in 2012, Joy Global in 2017, Quadco and Southstar in 2018, Timberpro in 2019 and Bracke Forest in 2022.
Today they have 1,650 employees, 770 are based in this plant in Umea which is the company’s headquarters and production facility.
They are a part of Komatsu Ltd which is one of the worlds largest manufacturers of construction, mining, forestry and utility machines. Komatsu was founded in 1921 in the Japanese city of Komatsu and has 64,000 employees in their 69 factories around the globe.
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That’s a remarkable amount of work hours for a single machine, the Norcar 600 owned by Erkki Rinne is taken well care of, it even has the original Diesel engine.
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Kieran Anders is a forestry contractor working in the lake district. His work involves hand cutting and extracting timber using a skidder and tractor-trailer forwarder.
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It is not possible to eliminate chain shot, but there are simple steps that can be taken to reduce the risk.
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Arwel takes great pride in the fact that the mill has no waste whatsoever, “the peelings are used for children’s playgrounds, gardens and for farm animals in barns in the winter and the sawdust has multiple uses in gardens and farms as well.
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Timber hauliers need to encourage young blood in, and also look after the hauliers we have, we need make the sector a safe and positive place to work.
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This is an impressive forestry machine manufacturer that became carbon neutral in 2023 and has the security of the giant corporation of Komatsu Ltd behind them.
After an introduction from Tim regarding Komatsu’s commitment to customer service and how they plan to achieve a greener and cleaner future by having their first electric powered machine on the market by the turn of the decade.
It was now lunch time, and you appreciate the importance manufacturers place on their workforce, all the places we had visited offered their workers first class facilities with an excellent choice of both nourishing and healthy food choices at mealtimes.
Our tour took place on an overhead gantry above the production area, so we had a completely unobstructed view, it was incredible being able to see the whole building process from start to finish. At the start of the factory was the storage area and this looked akin to an Amazon warehouse with row upon row of shelving units from floor to ceiling and a constant flow of parts leaving for the production line.
The production setup entails a single assembly line where both harvesters and forwarders are built. This offers many advantages, including the ability to follow up quality, availability and safety in detail, it allows greater flexibility and shorter lead times.
The assembly line was driven by automated guided vehicles, or AGVs for short, which are driverless forklifts that automatically move along the production line at a slow speed. This enables a safer way of working as the machines do not need to be lifted to move them along the line.
It was mesmerising to see the progress that was being made as the machines moved slowly along the line, there was areas to either side where items like cabins were being fitted out and they were then moved over to the production line to be installed. This was one of the most modern, well thought out and efficient production lines I had ever seen.
The investment companies like Komatsu Forest must spend on research and development must be phenomenal, their very first two grip harvester, the 902, was released in 1979 and was the most advanced forestry machine on the market. Over 500 of these machines were built and sold between 1979 and 1994.
Komatsu has been a frontrunner with technology, here is an example of just a few of their achievements. 1984 saw the launch of the 901, a single grip harvester with a levelling cabin, in 1997 they introduced the world’s first mobile computer with colour screen for forestry machines and in 2012 the world’ s first fleet management system Maxi Fleet was introduced.
We were on a tight schedule so unfortunately didn’t have a lot of time to spare but this visit was certainly an eye opening experience.
Our next stop was to the nearby Volvo Truck factory where they made the cabs for the FH, FM and FMX models.
This was the biggest and most modern manufacturing plant I had ever seen; it was a walk of over 1km from the main entrance/reception area on an overhead walkway to the start of the production line.
This is a carbon neutral facility which was achieved by replacing propane with DME and by cutting energy consumption through the use of an ice-cold underground river to cool the production machinery.
It is one of the world’s most modern cab plants using advanced manufacturing technology with robots and computerised monitoring. There are 1,700 employees at this plant but as far as I could tell the workers on the production line must have been programmers and maintenance staff as this was a fully automated robotic facility.
The speed and precision these machines work to is incredible, for a minute I thought I must be in a Terminator move and right in the heart of Skynet. I was looking at the robots along with Adam Howie who is a top engineer for timber haulage and in all my years of knowing Adam this was the first time I had seen him rendered speechless.
Watching them press the sheet metal into designated shapes, pass it to other robots who tack weld them all together before more robots inspect the dimensions are correct before the final welds are done was mesmerising and almost hypnotic.
We were all wearing headphones so our guide could describe what was happening at each stage and it was when we started to get quoted production numbers you realised that we were witnessing was almost beyond comprehension.
A painted, fully fitted ready to be installed cab leaves the production line every 90 seconds, and they can manufacture up to 90,000 cabs each year.
A train arrives each day to take the cab’s from the plant for delivery to their main market which is Europe but they are also sent to Asia, Africa, North and South America and Australia.
The group was moving forward but quite a few of us could have stayed watching the robots working in this area for hours, we were in a bit of a hurry as production was due to cease shortly for the weekend as it was a Friday afternoon.
We arrived at the paint area and Volvo has a phenomenal range of colours with around 800 different ones available, with their focus on environmental improvements they have managed to achieve status as the world’s cleanest and most energy-efficient paint shop.
There was so much to take in that you would probably need a week to see this facility properly but watching the speed and efficiency of the paint shop was jaw dropping.
The line was now stopping so we didn’t see the finishing process but the speed and efficiency of what we had seen had astounded most of the group.
We made our way back to the reception area for coffee and cake before heading off on our last visit of the day to Olofsfors.
It was a bout a 30 minute drive to Olofsfors and quite dark by the time we arrived.
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