Forest Industry Solutions
The forest industry provides an enormous number of products for commercial and industrial use. These can include finished structural components used for building construction, or raw material in the form of wood pulp, used in the production of paper products.
Sawmills rely on heavy equipment, running for long periods, that can cut, plane, mold and perform various finishing processes. Planning and scheduling the right products and in the right quantities are a major challenge, often determined by the type and quality of the timber being fed from trucks, rail and river, as well as product demand.
Pulp and paper mills are unique operations and can be integrated. These mills would receive logs or wood chips and produce paper as the result.
This industry is sensitive to commodity pricing and especially to the overall economy of geographic markets it serves. Cost controls and environmental pressures factor into the entire business.
Customer Focus Areas
- Production Management
- Scheduling
- Transportation and logistics
- Financial reporting
Use Case Example
Ceiba Solutions provided expert implementation and development support for an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software project for one of North America’s long-standing leaders in the sustainable wood products industry. This company, the largest hardwood and hardwood veneer manufacturer, needed help rolling out a single integrated software solution across multiple mills with differing business requirements.
In the Plywood Division, Ceiba led a team of 12 developers in support of the make-to-order business, encompassing 10,000 raw material products, 250,000 finished goods products and more than 300 users.
In the Veneer Division, Ceiba headed a team of six developers to design, develop and rollout a project with mills in Canada and Maine, Vermont and Illinois. It sparked significant cost reductions through minimizing excessive stock inventory and improving the Available to Promise capability.
The resulting project, which included all facets of design, customization and user training, was a major step forward in providing visibility of real-time information and consistency of reporting.
Related Ceiba Products and Services
- ERP Assessment Services
- Application integration
- Composite Software Development