Central plans of the program are to increase Savonlinna plywood mill’s production volume by adding new shifts and to re-organise and rationalize Jyväskylä plywood mill’s production along with outsourcing of mill cleaning. In addition, staffing at Joensuu plywood mill will be strengthen to open production and maintenance bottlenecks.
Savonlinna plywood mill will move to 6 day production week from current five days. In order to facilitate the change, the mill starts recruiting of about 40 persons through the mill’s apprenticeship program.
Joensuu plywood mill has moved to the 6 day production week already earlier but production bottlenecks require still some additional personnel. Operations at Jyväskylä plywood mill are planned to be improved through production tasks’ re-organisation and outsourcing of mill cleaning. The re-organisation and outsourcing is estimated to results in about 30 redundancies in Jyväskylä. The persons who may lose their job at Jyväskylä will be offered re-location to Savonlinna or Joensuu if possible.
”Our Finnish birch plywood mills have suffered from poor profitability already for a long time. High labour costs are a remarkable challenge in labour intensive operations. Especially the Jyväskylä mill has made losses despite the good market demand,” says Mika Kekki, Production & Operations Vice President at UPM Plywood.
Employee negotiations regarding the re-organization and outsourcing will start in Jyväskylä on 14 October, 2015. The negotiations are estimated to be concluded by the end of the year. Recruiting in Savonlinna and Joensuu will start as soon as possible and are estimated to be completed by the end of January 2016 depending on progress of the negotiations in Jyväskylä.
