Mehmet Sedat Balioglu

Owner/Director
Pika Retech

Re-Engineering Efficiency: Sustainable Nano-Technology for the Wood-Based Panel Industry

The ReJIT Nano-Paraffin Emulsion System exemplifies a pioneering advancement in paraffin application technology, engineered to augment the performance and sustainability of wood-based panel manufacturing. Developed by Pika Retech, this patented nano-emulsion facilitates homogeneous paraffin distribution at the microstructural level, thereby attaining enhanced water resistance and dimensional stability, while concurrently reducing overall paraffin consumption. Mehmet will elucidate how ReJIT’s advanced formulation and particle engineering confer quantifiable benefits in process efficiency, energy conservation, and environmental sustainability. Based on insights gathered from industrial installations across Europe, Asia, and South America, the session will underscore how ReJIT assists in these domains. Manufacturers meet modern performance demands while moving toward greener and more cost-effective production practices.

Chris Beard

Vice President, Building Products Research
John Burns Research and Consulting

Understanding Near-Term and Longer-Term Drivers That Impact Wood Panel Usage in Housing

Chris outlines key macroeconomic and consumer trends that will heavily influence wood panel demand in residential construction over the coming years. He provides an outlook on the changing market dynamics that affect homes and apartments being built today and in the future.

Steve Block

Director of Business Development
Omni Tech International

Reducing the Carbon Footprint Wood Adhesives with Soy

The demand for sustainable wood adhesives is rapidly growing and reducing their carbon footprint is at the forefront of new technological developments. Users of wood adhesives desire products that have a reduced environmental impact and an improved safety profile that also meet critical technical performance criteria. Reducing the carbon footprint for these types of products is an advantage that can be realized with U.S. soy-based products, which will be discussed through life cycle analysis methodology. Additionally, soy-based wood adhesives utilize renewable resources, offer lower toxicity, improved energy efficiency, and biodegradation when compared with traditional wood adhesive technologies. Various products are available that demonstrate notable environmental impact benefits, making them ideal for both consumer and industrial use. Some of the other benefits that will be presented include low VOC, formaldehyde free, improved durability, high biobased carbon content, LEED building eligibility, and improved indoor air quality. In summary, soy-based wood adhesives increase the sustainability of end products and offer benefits not realized with synthetic products.  

Charles Bradford

Vice President of Procurement
Scotch Plywood Co.

From Ashes to Operations: Leading Through Crisis in the Forest Products Industry

In January 2021, Scotch Plywood’s Waynesboro, Miss. veneer mill was destroyed by fire, resulting in a total loss. Faced with the challenge of sustaining operations, supporting employees, and honoring commitments to landowners and customers, the company’s leadership team made the decision to rebuild the mill while maintaining production with minimal interruption. Over the next 14 months, Scotch Plywood bused employees 120 miles daily to its Beatrice, Ala. facility, transported logs, and operated extended shifts to keep veneer moving and customers supplied. In March 2022, the rebuilt mill came online, reached prior production standards within two weeks, and set new production records within months. This session shares leadership and operational lessons, offering insights on resilience, crisis management, and the importance of preserving trust with employees, suppliers, and landowners.

Ken Carter

Vice President
Winston Plywood & Veneer

From Tribulation to Triumph (A Plywood Journey)

Ken talks about how the Louisville, Miss. and area community recovered from a catastrophic event and how Winston Plywood & Veneer became a cornerstone of the recovery and rebuild plan. Topics of discussion include:

challenges of working through a FEMA funding project; challenges of starting up a greenfield project after a catastrophic event; challenges of staffing a greenfield project; the challenge of gaining the trust of the community again. And Ken addresses the rewards of seeing the operation’s and the community’s progress over the past 10 years.

Daniel Chastenais

Vice-President Sales & Marketing
Tanguay Machinery

Optimize Your Mill Infeed with Electrical Knuckleboom Loaders

Electrical knuckleboom presentation of various OSB, chipping and sawmill installations, providing and creating ideas to increase mill infeed, improve reliability and safety. Will feature Tanguay’s latest remote-control loaders, the smaller 10-ton class and the monster 70-ton class loaders and the innovative Swap Boom Controls. Will also present the benefits of using electrical power in lieu of diesel to reduce cost and enhance environmental benefits.

Joe Dahlen

Professor of Wood Quality & Forest Products
Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources
University of Georgia

Engineering with Nature’s Variability: Southern Pine Wood Properties and Product Performance

Lorne Fardy

VP of Product Development
Kadant Carmanah Design

Using 3D Camera Systems to Improve Log Stranding Throughput and Strand Quality for OSB Production

Very little attention is dedicated to tracking and analyzing the log stranding process in an oriented strandboard (OSB) mill. Decisions about how to set up, operate, and maintain a strander and its components are traditionally influenced by the quality and throughput seen downstream at the press. To help green end production managers gain more visibility across their stranding operation in real time, Kadant Carmanah has developed, installed, and thoroughly field-tested the next generation of 3D camera systems within its ARGUS Smart-Connected Technologies platform for the strander. At the strander’s infeed pocket, the log fill camera system now collects more than 50,000 data points every one-tenth of a second, while at the strander’s outfeed conveyor, the strand quality camera system now calculates the geometric distribution of strands. This presentation will demonstrate how these improvements are providing deeper layers of insight with increased accuracy to help green end production managers optimize the capacity, quality, and profitability of their stranding operation. 

Jay Galloway

President
Hood Industries

Rebuilding for the Future

Jay provides a brief overview of Hood Industries and its history with the Beaumont, Miss. facility, where Hood Industries began in May 1983. In April 2022, an F-3 tornado hit the Beaumont facility the night of Easter Sunday. The severity of the damage immediately rendered the facility unsafe to occupy and operate. The decision was made to rebuild the Beaumont operation, and Hood set out to establish its strategy for rebuilding. There have been many challenges with trying to rebuild a facility of this magnitude without significant time to plan, design and engineer. When a facility is shut down without notice it greatly increases the sense of urgency. Jay provides details around the facility Hood has built, where Hood is in the process and Hood’s expectations for the mill once it is at full capacity.

Todd Havican

Sales Director
Fagus GreCon

Keeping Facilities and Personnel Safer

Spark detections and extinguishment—an overview of sparks and how they are detected and extinguished, including the latest technologies from GreCon to assist in helping keep facilities safer; with emphasis on specific areas of panels facilities that need to be protected with spark detection and a review of what detectors and extinguishment do this the best.

Rob Johnson

Senior Vice President of Manufacturing Operations
Boise Cascade

Boise Cascade Wood Products – Focused and Ready

An overview of Boise Cascade Wood Products’ manufacturing footprint and product capabilities along with how Boise sustains readiness to serve customers in all market conditions.

Amanda Lang

President & COO
Forisk Consulting

Fiber and Timber Supply and Outlook

Changes in timber markets create opportunities for wood-using businesses. Amanda addresses fiber and timber supplies in the U.S. and provides regional outlooks. She also provides an update on announced mill openings and closings and potential impacts to local wood basins. She includes an update of timber market trends and how these impact supplies of residual fiber and supplies of timber for OSB, plywood, and engineered wood products businesses.

Thomas Mende

Chief Sales Officer
Binderholz Timber

Mass Timber Trends and How to Make Mass Timber More Suitable for the Building Products Distribution Business

David Neal

Executive Vice President
Georgia-Pacific Building Products

Matthew O’Malia

President and CEO
TimberHP

Derek Ratchford

CEO
SmartLam North America

David Reed

Technical Director
Timber Products Company

Roll Squeezer Project

The Meinan roll squeezer project was initiated in 2022. The project was based on a need to improve veneer dryer capacity for Timber Products’ plywood manufacturing facilities in southern Oregon. Timber Products leveraged the opportunity to mechanically remove water and avoid increased greenhouse gas emissions from hot air drying. The project considered evaluation of veneer thickness reduction and cellular damage to the peeled veneer. The project also reviewed limitations of roll squeezing for total moisture content removal and throughput of the roll squeezer. The presentation will cover all these topics and strategies employed to address each. 

Jim Salchenberg

Director of Strategic Products
Roseburg

Roseburg’s Capital Evolution: From Legacy to Billion Dollar Investment

 Jim offers an inside look at how Roseburg scaled its capital investment strategy from $70 million to more than $1 billion in the post-COVID era. Building on Kenneth Ford’s foundational legacy, Jim’s presentation reveals Roseburg’s proven CapEx process that delivers success through operations-led project ownership and integration of engineering, project management, and field teams. This presentation includes a brief overview of some of the significant investments by Roseburg in the last five years.

Pat Schleisman

Engineered Wood Specialist
APA—The Engineered Wood Assn.

Mass Timber Basics

Learn about engineered wood products, especially mass timber, and how (and why) mass timber has been incorporated into projects across North America. Explore glue-laminated (glulam) timber and cross-laminated timber (CLT), covering manufacturing processes, design specifications, performance and environmental benefits through real-world case studies. 

Bijan Shams

Vice President, Founder
Cogent Industrial Technologies

Capital Projects 4.0: Building the Next Generation of Smart Wood Panel Manufacturing Facilities

As the wood panel industry enters the digital era, competitive advantage depends on how plants are designed—not just how they operate. In this presentation, Bijan introduces Capital Projects 4.0, a framework for building new wood panel facilities that integrate automation, connectivity, and data analytics from the ground up. Drawing on three decades of capital project experience, he explains how early digital design decisions—spanning FEED through commissioning—enable AI-ready, continuously optimizing plants that deliver measurable improvements in uptime, quality, and energy efficiency. Attendees will learn how to design a digital thread connecting all stages of a greenfield project; specify smart instrumentation and open data architectures for seamless IT/OT integration; prepare plants for AI-driven optimization and predictive insights from day one; leverage real-time data for continuous improvement in uptime, quality, and energy use. 

Steve Jaasund

Senior Product Manager
Andritz

Exploring the Nature of Wood Dryer Emissions 

Panelboard manufacturers are very familiar with the challenges of controlling air pollution emissions from wood drying. Unfortunately, in many cases, an incomplete understanding of the nature of such emissions has led to costly mistakes in the application of necessary air emission control equipment such as wet ESPs and RTOs. A better understanding of the nature of wood dryer emissions can help prevent such costly mistakes. This presentation will discuss the formation and characteristics of the various types of emissions generated by thermal wood drying and the suitability of available emission control technologies for each category of emissions. 

Brian Via

Director, Forest Products Development Center
Auburn University

Soy Flour–Modified Adhesives for Improved Wood Panel Manufacturing 

Soy flour (SF) incorporation into hot- and cold-pressed systems—pMDI, PF, and Isoset—offers both performance and processing benefits for engineered wood products. SF absorbs moisture in the furnish, suppresses steam generation during pressing, and increases internal board pressure, improving early-stage bonding and reducing common pressing defects such as blow-through, springback, and warp. The steam-suppression effect has been clearly demonstrated in PF plywood production.

Full-scale mill trials have been conducted for preservative-treated wood (Isoset) and two MDF manufacturers using pMDI, validating SF as a practical, biobased co-reactant. In a recent PF plywood trial (August 2025), wheat flour was replaced with soy flour, resulting in a 15% reduction in PF resin usage while maintaining D-6 and boil shear properties. And potential increase is press speed was also discovered due to soy’s tolerance for moisture causing blows. Laboratory testing confirmed compliance with key APA PS-1 standards, and follow-up independent testing is planned to validate these results for potential commercial adoption.

Timothy Young

Professor Emeritus/Interim Director
Data Science Institute
The University of Tennessee/School of Natural Resources

How Machine Learning and AI Will Transform the Leading Companies of the Panel Industries 

Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are transforming the industrial and business landscape at an unprecedented pace—what many are calling the Fifth Industrial Revolution. For leading companies, ML has become a powerful tool for improving profitability and operational performance. By uncovering hidden correlations, complex hierarchical interactions, and unknown sources of variation, ML provides “new eyes” for understanding and optimizing processes. These algorithms are emerging as modern root-cause analysis tools, identifying novel pathways to reduce process variation, lower operational setpoints, increase line speeds, and decrease per-unit production costs. As a result, companies that adopt AI technologies are rapidly gaining advantage over those that do not. This presentation introduces the fundamentals of ML applications for panel manufacturing and explores real-world case studies demonstrating successful implementation. It also addresses the evolving role of humans in adapting to AI-driven environments, emphasizing collaboration between human expertise and machine intelligence in this new industrial era.