Logging for Greater Profitability
“Your business is not to get ahead of others but to get ahead of yourself; to break your own records, to outstrip your yesterdays by your today, to do your work with more force than ever before.”
Stewart B. Johnson
Our daylong Logger Business Profitability Training Workshop will be a hands on session to help your Logging Company document and analyze your operating cost to help make critical business decisions and run your company with greater business confidence. The PATH software spreadsheet is designed to accomplish this vital piece of your business operations.
PATH will help calculate your company’s current operating costs as a means to evaluate your company’s projected growth. It will also help your company better evaluate the true cost of a particular job and will help you make critical decisions about equipment changes or replacements and the expected financial returns those decisions will make for your company. In short, your production price levels will be calculated to show your logging company’s profitability.
Building on your Company’s own individual cost information, we will examine your throughput and the application of proven production technology and how it impacts your profitability. Finally, we will show how continuously improving day to day production opportunities and the management of individual projects can make a significant difference in the logging company’s bottom line.
The cost of the one day session is $100 dollars per company. It is strongly encouraged bookeepers attend as well.
Workshop Highlights
- Brief general review of Microsoft Excel – use; navigation; saving files as templates; worksheets; macros and security; Excel alternatives. If you are not familiar in the use of Excel, do not worry, we will have people in the class able and ready to help you work your way through.
- Introduction to PATH Software – What is it? Where did it come from? What do I need to run it? How can I use it? Where can my friends get a copy?
- General Production Analysis for Logging Business – create a quick thumbnail of production costs for your business from income tax return information; “what if” scenarios; viewing and interpreting business report; brief exercises
- Calculating Machine Rates & Truck Rates – understanding machine rates; example and exercise in entering data for individual machines; altering variables;
- Production Prices – combining machine rates with other cost data to figure help evaluate your prices
- Are We Striving, Thriving or Just Surviving? - compare production rate prices and recognize the levels that erode equity, pay simple wage or offer an actual return on your investment
- Trucking Costs – brief overview of PATH’s approach to determining and evaluating trucking costs.
- Calculating and Comparing Costs Structures of Various Logging Systems – Using your detailed information for an entire equipment profile; examining production costs for your entire business; comparing and evaluating alternative mixes; adding or deleting equipment; example and exercise
- Break Even Analysis – This is a critical business management tool that will help you calculate prices and production levels necessary for renewed investment in equipment
- Estimating Production Costs for Individual Timber Harvesting Jobs – applying cost structure information to individual jobs
- Developing Your Own Productivity Reports – recording information from recently completed jobs to provide a reference database for future decisions.
- PATH Utilities – combining different products such as amortization of loans, etc.
- Group Exercises - using PATH to model logging businesses alternatives for your company; participants will select from a variety of alternatives to compare the cost structures of alternative equipment profiles.
- Continuous Improvement and the Theory of Constraints – You will be applying production theory from manufacturing to the timber harvesting process. Discussion of the need for this approach and why. You will be able to identify and clear bottlenecks, and then exploit your controlling constraint to increase throughput.
- Logging Site Management – identify the critical chain of events that allow you to end production on one site and start it up again on another; gain productive days to help your bottom line.