Growing Indonesia Furniture Producer Replacing Old Machinery with Modern Sawmills

Doddik Sulistiono is the owner of Citra Fajar Utama - a wood processing and furniture manufacturing company in the Klaten region of Central Java, Indonesia.

“We process sonokeling [Indian rosewood] and jati teak,” Mr. Sulistiono shares, “into various products such as decorative moulding profiles, guitar material, and laminated boards. We also produce furniture from sonokeling and jati teak. We supply Starbucks locations throughout Indonesia with table tops.”

In addition to local demand, the company exports its timber and furniture to China, South Korea, and Taiwan. 

“Our production begins with cutting our logs on the sawmill and then measuring out sizes for the boards,” explains Mr. Sulistiono.

The company was using the traditional vertical bandsaws for all their log breakdown. They began to look for other options and tried out a Wood-Mizer sawmill. They were so impressed with the surface quality and recovery, that they decided to buy three Wood-Mizer machines – an LT15 and two LX100 sawmills.

“Why do we use Wood-Mizer?” Mr. Sulistiono explains. “It’s because log prices are high nowadays. We want to save more timber from each log and get a higher quality surface. That’s why the Wood-Mizer sawmills are important for our production process.”

“We were able to reduce our costs - especially our production cost dropped after implementing the Wood-Mizer sawmills. Since we get better surface quality, we no longer have to send the wood through a double planer.”

Richard Soegitanto, one of Wood-Mizer’s agents in Indonesia, shares more: “The information we’ve got from the customer when they use the Wood-Mizer machine is that they can recover 15-18% more than the traditional bandsaw. Using the Wood-Mizer sawmills, they can get a better surface and skip the double-planing process. So now we have a lot of LT15s and LX100s installations in the market.”

“They are using Wood-Mizer blades because, as you know, sonokeling and Indonesian rosewood is hard timber. And they are delighted with the quality they get. They use [the blade] for about two hours and then cool it down, sharpen, and reuse it again the next day.”

“We can cut around 25-30 cubic meters of timber total with one blade,” Mr. Sulistiono said.

Mr. Sulistiono uses several vertical bandsaws to keep up with order fulfillment. Still, he is building a new manufacturing area and plans to continue adding Wood-Mizer sawmills as his business grows. 

“We decided to buy one more LX100 and LT15 sawmill. We plan to buy an LT40 or LT70 sawmill to increase our productivity, especially during the log cutting process.”

“In Indonesia nowadays, there is a growing concern about the need for cutting wood wisely and not cutting wood carelessly so that our forests and the trees we process can continue being available.”

“And we must preserve that natural resource of the big trees we still have.”

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