INFLOR
One-Stop-Shop for Forestry Management

Founded in 2001 in Brazil, INFLOR is innovating the way biological assets are managed around the world. It has been collaborating with different people in their quest to spread forest cover. With a track record of 18 years of experience, the company has spread the forest cover over 29 Mn acres of land across four continents. INFLOR has developed solutions that help users maximize performance in managing forests and agricultural assets to leverage their earnings from the conscious use of natural resources and respecting the environment and society. The company started with a solution for Eucalyptus fiber production for the paper industry. The comprehensive solution helps the user by providing procedures for increasing productivity, monitoring environmental conditions, producing seedlings, growing forests and developing it at roads, controlling diseases, managing machinery and teams, and budgeting the whole chain. This has helped them expand their footprint from Brazil to Europe, Asia, Africa, and the U.S. The following conversation with Enivanis de Abreu Vilela, CEO at INFLOR, provides more profound insights into the company and the solutions they offer to their clients.

How do your solutions help your customers meet the complex requirements of the industry?

We offer our customers a one-stop-shop solution. For instance, if the client wants to map their property to use it in the best possible way, they can use our solution to model it, and then see how the forest would grow there. They can further use the solution for budgeting, controlling investments, and so on to do large-scale forestry at low prices to promote goodwill. We are like an ERP tool that provides control over finances and all other related operations.

Our flagship product is INFLOR Forest. Many enterprises use the solution, on-premise, either directly or through subcontractors to manage their forests right from planting to checking productivity, sending spare parts to the field for maintenance purpose, and more. Additionally, we also have the software as a service (SaaS) model, where the clients can access our solution through the web to manage their properties. Clients also leverage the solution to generate invoices for payments and to calculate and pay taxes. It also comes with a dashboard for the users to see the KPIs and know how it controls the entire operation.

What makes INFLOR surge ahead of its competitors in the industry?

With our in-depth experience of the industry, we bring to the table the best practices in forest management. Therefore, by using our solution, customers can reduce their operational costs by up to 15 percent on their yearly budgets through more efficient planning and management. For example, if there are multiple areas to be managed for a client, our algorithms use geographic information to create ratings for each area. By leveraging these ratings, the clients can decide the best practices that can be implemented in those areas. So if there is flat terrain, it can easily be mechanized and fertilized, and therefore our clients can be assured of better profits for the investments that they have made in that area. However, for an area with a sloped terrain, on analyzing the weather variables, it might become evident that fertilizing it would be fruitless. Therefore, we can help our clients to save that money to invest in other areas to further enhance profits. Our solution can also be used to determine what machinery can be used for harvesting based on the development of the tree, space between two trees, and so on. So for each step of forest management, we have specific processes and tools to help clients in improving their productivity and reducing the costs.

Additionally, we are also a very socially committed company, and we build relationships with the communities where we operate. For instance, if wood needs to be transported to an area close to where a community lives, we help our clients to predict the impact so that they come up with a strategy which would help them do business without disturbing these communities. In a nutshell, we have planned all the different variables to ensure that the forestry business is not just profitable but also sustainable as well.

Could you share with us a case study where you helped one of your clients overcome their challenges?

Our first client based in the U.S. is a forest management company with offices throughout the country. The operations in the Southeast and the Pacific coast differ due to differences in species, products, ways of control, and more. They were using multiple solutions to manage all these operations, and therefore, it was hard to aggregate all the information to compare costs and productivity and also to manage all the information in a single database. So they contacted us, and we provided them a single database for them to manage their operations with our flexible solution. We use different parameterizations for each business model that they have, and then we aggregate all this information into our platform. This has helped them manage all their operations in different offices using a single tool from our platform. We are presently making adjustments to incorporate the needs of the U.S. market since it is different from other countries, and our flexible approach has helped us in this regard.

What does the future have in store for INFLOR?

On the geographical forefront, we have opened our first office in the U.S. at Orlando in line with our plans to expand our operations there. On the other hand, when it comes to our technology, we are coming up with a new version of our product that will have mobile features so that users get the constant functionality even when they are doing operations in the field. We have also come up with an AI-based virtual assistant to serve customers better. The assistant will be a significant improvement in our next release.