Timbeter Blog

A sawmill’s blind spot: small-diameter logs

Some sawmills get to choose their wood supply. Others take what the region gives them. Savanna Pallets, a U.S. pallet and lumber producer, operates a mill in a market where buying good timber is genuinely difficult, and the result was a steady stream of undersized logs mixed into every load.

“We had no method of measuring diameters going into our sawmill except rudimentary visual inspections,” says Patrick Pulles of Savanna Pallets. “Our problem was that one of our mills is in a difficult region for buying wood and often receives too many small diameter logs. We needed a reliable way to methodically track the percentage of small diameter logs going into the mill.”

Without a measurement method, that meant guessing. Nobody could say with confidence whether 5% or 15% of a day’s intake was below spec, only that it felt like a problem.

The gap: subjective measurement, inconsistent yield

The deeper issue wasn’t just log diameter — it was what happened when yield dropped and nobody could explain why. Lumber output per cord fluctuated from day to day, and the mill floor had no objective way to trace the cause.

“All we had was anecdotal information. If one day the log yield was good , it might be attributed to blades, optimizers, or log quality but no one trusted the answer and built from it. Similarly, if we had a bad log yield day, we would generally attribute it to log quality but we didn’t have anything objective and rigorous to point to and build from,” Pulles explains. Small-diameter wood became the default scapegoat, whether or not it was actually responsible. That kind of guesswork makes it nearly impossible to improve buying decisions or mill setup with any confidence.

What changed: turning photos into yard-wide visibility

Savanna Pallets chose Timbeter after hearing directly from another operator using it. “A very good interview with Braien Kasser,” says Pulles, “plus Timbeter could be implemented right away with a smartphone or tablet.” No new hardware, no lengthy rollout — just a camera and a workflow change.

That workflow now runs through a dedicated yard manager. “We have hired a yard manager, part of whose job is to take Timbeter photos of incoming truckloads and the logs going into the mill from our log loader,” Pulles says. Every load in, and every log going toward the saw, gets measured and recorded — giving the team a running picture of how far out-of-spec their inventory actually is.

The data changed more than expectations — it changed the diagnosis. “Once we started using Timbeter and taking photos of all logs fed into the mill via the log loader, we had objective information to help explain why the log yield was good one day and then bad on another,” Pulles says. The answer wasn’t the simple story the mill floor had assumed. “It wasn’t the simple, expected answer of ‘bigger diameters are always better.’ Some of the bad yield days had a large percentage of bigger diameters and our slab line as currently designed wasn’t able to capture enough lumber from the bigger slabs. Eventually we discovered a narrow ‘sweet spot’ in between big and small, and while we are now targeting that range of diameters more directly in our buying program, the discovery also led us to make changes to our slab line to improve our yield on the bigger pieces.”

Exploiting and expanding that sweet spot is now driving capital decisions. Because Timbeter showed the mill had enough larger logs to justify it, Savanna Pallets is investing in its slab line to increase board width — a change made on data, not intuition.

The measurable result: the share of below-minimum diameter logs in inventory dropped from 7% to below 4%. “This has translated to a small improvement in our log yield which over the course of a year is producing big results,” Pulles notes.

Beyond one mill: why objective data matters industry-wide

Yard disputes over log quality are common wherever wood supply is tight and buying decisions are made under pressure — not just at U.S. mills like Savanna Pallets, but across Latin America’s pine and eucalyptus regions and Southeast Asia’s plantation supply chains. When measurement is subjective, it’s also political: someone’s estimate becomes someone else’s grievance.

“Manual measurement methods are subjective and prone to significant errors and biases over time, and they lead to conflict,” Pulles says. Replacing that with a photo-based record doesn’t just settle arguments faster — it gives procurement and mill operations a shared, auditable basis for decisions that used to rely on rules of thumb.

Adoption wasn’t a barrier, either. “Timbeter is very user-friendly and easy to learn,” Pulles adds. “Our yard managers do not have prior experience with apps or tablets and were able to learn it very quickly.”

Turning insight into action

Savanna Pallets didn’t just fix a measurement problem — it uncovered a diameter “sweet spot” that’s now shaping buying decisions and slab-line investment. As Pulles puts it: “It will save you time that you now spend making manual measurements that are subjective and prone to disagreement, and it will make you learn about your log inventory and modify some of the assumptions and rules-of-thumb you’ve been using but which may not be valid.” If your yard is still relying on visual estimates, book a free Timbeter demo to see what your own log inventory data would reveal.