Green Resources is East Africa’s largest forest development and wood processing company. The company manages approximately 38,000 ha of plantation forest in Mozambique, Tanzania and Uganda. It operates industrial facilities including two sawmills, three pole treatment plants, and a briquetting plant. Green Resources was established in 1995 and is a private Norwegian company with both private and institutional investors. We interviewed Hampus Hamilton, the General Manager of Forestry, to understand how Timbeter has helped them optimize and improve their daily operations.
In terms of cost-efficiency, what has been the effect of using Timbeter? How have your processes changed?
One of the biggest changes is through real-time reporting, which makes the processes more efficient, transparent, and cost effective for both us and our customers. Timbeter allows us to share reports in real time with customers as the trucks are being loaded, allowing our customers to view the content of a shipment before it has been delivered. This replaces our previous practice of scaling logs at destination factories, which delayed both turn-around for trucks and was costly both in terms of transporting log-scalers between several different destinations and overtime costs when trucks arrived outside of normal working hours.
How have your logistics changed?
Since we started using Timbeter, there is now no delay in the loading process due to quick measurements and the real-time data available. It also gives the truck driver information on the volume, meaning trips are better optimized in terms of loading capacity.
Also, as mentioned before, one big improvement is that log- scalers no longer have to move between the different factories we supply, instead they only need to move around in plantations.
How has Timbeter affected the harvesting and processing processes?
Providing immediate feedback to the harvesting team and operators on log-classes ensures that correct specs are loaded for different customers, therefore improving forest utilization. In addition, accurate measurements with GPS positions and volumes by log-classes at the point of loading significantly improved the accuracy of actual volumes recorded back to the harvesting area for comparison against projected volumes.
In regards to clients and partners, has Timbeter had any positive impact?
The use of Timbeter as a third party system for calculating volumes has completely negated the risk of bias present in manual measurements systems.
What have been the improvements to the safety of workers after adopting Timbeter?
Timbeter has completely removed the need for scaling teams to physically handle logs, reducing Health and Safety (H&S) risk related to working on or in close proximity to logs stacks.
How Timbeter has improved the company’s digital transformation?
With Timbeter we have moved into a paperless system where production reports are being updated throughout the day from a centralized location via Timbeter.
