Forest and Wood

is highly regulated industry across the whole supply chain which brings an extra load on businesses for data processing and reporting to authorities. In addition to classic business tasks, companies must be able to collect, process and exchange business data in a real time from remote and very frequently also mobile work centres. This requires digital solutions that allow to integrate workforce and technical resources in a single company wide management system. 

From the business point of view, the most complicated and critical task is to see stock balance and costs in a real time and at any procurement stage. With sophisticated cost allocation and systematization production processes become visible for financial review and companies immediately are able to react on price or demand fluctuations in the market. 

From the data management point of view, the major challenge is big data. For example, saw log measurements are carried out by scanning each log and this generates a huge amount of data to be processed daily. Capability to transfer these metric data into accurate quantitative and financial data consistent with regulations and contracts, including settlement of accounts with suppliers and data transfer to business partners is business critical.  

In practice this can be solved with placing a strong Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution in the core to manage and control financial flow and add custom solutions to collect real-time metric data from electronic devices involved in the production process – cutting and sawing equipment, forestry machines or simple mobile devices that employees use for data input. 

viaPro has accumulated experience with integrated solutions for all logging and wood processing steps, starting with cutting, forwarding, transportation and sales of saw logs up to  lumber processing and production. Solutions developed by viaPro can be used as a stand-alone or hand in hand with Epicor iScala which brings value added with support of accurate self-cost calculation  for each procurement step.

Did you know that forestry plays important role in Latvian economy being the sector with positive export/import balance?  -key numbers here.