26.02.2025
Natural wood panel factory Imst: Technology leap thanks to full automation
Pfeifer has thoroughly modernised the Imst natural wood panel factory over the last few years. Investment of around 18 million euros has ensured clear gains in efficiency and raw material yield and maintained the company’s competitiveness.
About the man
Dietmar Seelos began his career at Pfeifer in 1986 as a sawing technology apprentice in Imst. After several management roles, including head of production at the Imst sawmill from 1996 and technical manager of various plants, in 2009 he took over as plant manager at the Imst site. Since mid-May 2024, he has also been managing director of the Schlitz site.
Natural wood panels have been produced at the Imst site since the 1980s. The factory has been fully modernised since 2020 under the leadership of site manager Dietmar Seelos, and the entire production cycle has been brought up to the state of the art. The goal was to automate all stages in the best possible way. The multi-year investment began in 2020/21 with the replacement of the middle layer production. Replacement of the top layer production followed in 2022/23. In 2024 Pfeifer took the latest step to fully automated production by installing a fully automated patching station for cosmetic imperfections like knotholes, resin galls, joints or cracks. The investment programme also involved infrastructure adjustments. This included the necessary hall extensions, replacing window surfaces, adapting fire protection and replacing suction technology. The project managers paid great attention to energy savings during the planning phase. Heat recovery was added to the suction system, for example, to minimise heat loss from the hall heating.
Annual saving of 120 truckloads of sawn wood
In addition to a significant reduction in personnel, the gradually modernised plant also delivers far higher yield values. In terms of raw material use, converting the separating technology for the layer preparation from long-serving circular saws to the latest thin-cutting band saw technology has produced an annual raw material saving of 6,000 m³. “This equates to around 120 truckloads of sawn wood that doesn’t have to be delivered”, says site and project manager Dietmar Seelos, explaining the impressive scaling effects.
Heavy manual tasks are completed automatically
Thanks to the high automation level, th e heavy manual tasks that used to be required, such as visual grading of the top layers or laborious manual stacking of the cut top layers, are now a thing of the past. The fully automated process has increased performance by more than 20% for the whole factory. The most recent investment was a milestone – replacement of the manual cosmetic station with a fully automated system. Equipped with the latest scanner technology to detect imperfections on the boards, the cosmetic finishing is now a fully automated process of milling out and then filling by pouring. The performance of the new system corresponds to about 8:1 compared to the conventionally used technology. “This alone explains the value of the investment for the overall flow of the factory”, says Seelos.
Developing and expanding occupational safety was another fixed point in the planning and realisation of the individual projects. All the investments resulted in an additional increase in safety at the workstations.
Continuous operation despite refitting
Realising projects of this scale in existing plants brings enormous challenges from the start. The goal was to keep the factory operating as well as possible despite the comprehensive interference with the existing systems technology. This was more than successful thanks to detailed planning and an extremely dedicated project team. Furthermore, none of the defined budgets were exceeded. “This demonstrates the excellent cooperation of the entire project team. Thanks for this are owed to all involved who have made this open-heart surgery a success”, says Dietmar Seelos, praising the dedication of his team.
About the Pfeifer Group
Pfeifer Holding GmbH was founded in Austria in 1948 and is now in the hands of the third generation of its owner family. Headquartered in the Austrian town of Imst in Tyrol, it employees 2,600 people at 13 sites in Austria, Germany, the Czech Republic and Finland. Around 5.4 million solid cubic metres of timber is cut every year in the Group’s fully integrated sawmills. This is then processed along the entire value chain into sawn and planed timber, concrete formwork panels, formwork beams, cross laminated timber, glue-laminated timber (glulam), glued solid wood panels, pallet blocks, briquettes, pellets and green electricity.