Trimble Forestry: Streamlining the Entire Forest Supply Chain

In 1978, when Charlie Trimble laid the foundation of his company from a small office located above the Los Altos theatre in Silicon Valley, all he possessed was an eye for innovation and a dream. It turns out, that’s just what it takes to make it big, and in about four years, Trimble had already made its landmark in the industry. They were the first to introduce a commercial, GPS-based geodetic-survey product for oil-drilling, marking the beginning of the explosive growth which followed. Today, Trimble is not only counted in the “who’s who” of software and hardware developers, but their global footprint is spread across 40 countries. The company is transforming the way the world works through its state-of-the-art technology in positioning, modeling, connectivity, and data analytics, which are currently used in over 150 countries around the world. Behind Trimble’s year on year growth is the president and CEO of the company, Steven Berglund who has held this position since 1999 and overtime led the company to great new heights. Today, Trimble is a mainstay across sectors from mining and mobile computing to forestry and field service. For the past two decades, Trimble has made great strides in forestry-based software solutions while improving productivity, efficiency, and safety in this vertical.

Naturally, when it comes to forestry solutions, today Trimble’s leading-edge CONNECTED FOREST™ suite is the solution of choice for commercial, government, and non-traditional organizations. CONNECTED FOREST comprises a wide range of solutions and integrated software that empowers organizations to manage the entire forest supply chain from planning, planting, growing, harvesting, transportation, and delivery.

End-to-End Forestry Solutions

To give a broader perspective into Trimble’s eclectic solutions suite first up is CFForest, which is a spatially-enabled ERP system specifically designed for forest owners. The solution offers tools to manage land records, forest inventory, silviculture and harvest activity planning and tracking, environmental management, wood procurement, and more. CFForest can support the business needs of forestry organizations of any size and its easy implementation and powerful viewing and editing tools to maintain data and increase business insight make it a big hit in the forestry industry.

For organizations that are on the lookout for forestry software that helps simplify cost and inventory-related tasks, then look no further than Trimble’s CFBusiness. This solution facilitates companies to streamline hauling, logging, timber purchase, and sales as well as work contracts for activities such as road maintenance and planting.

The feature that stands out the most for CFBusiness is its financial dashboard, which enables users to see key metrics around deliveries and revenue costs at a glance. Moreover, CFBusiness also works perfectly on a tablet or phone, allowing access to real-time delivery information at any place, any time. In addition to finance and inventory management, another area that always needs special attention is fleet management. Enter CFHarvest a day-to-day planning and operations control system for harvesting execution and forestry services. With CFHarvest, organizations can always stay ahead of their day-to-day planning and operations for harvesting execution. The software helps manage mixed fleet operations within one system, reduces roadside and terminal inventory levels, and increases revenue per machine.

Similar to CFHarvest is Trimble Forestry’s CFLogistics that reduces log logistics costs by making transportation scheduling and execution more effective. CFLogistics consists of two solutions—LogForce and WSX—that are perfect for managing transport planning from the starting depot to the destination. LogForce can be used by both the forest companies and contractors and also offers drivers real-time information on what is supposed to be delivered. On the other hand, WSX is a dedicated log supply plan execution and dispatch system, designed specifically to manage the execution of weekly log supply plans and provide stakeholders with all the key information necessary for responsive scheduling in a dynamic log supply chain. WSX is offered to customers as either a software model or as a full Central Dispatch Management Service (CDMS). Currently, CFLogistics is widely deployed in the Americas, Europe, and Oceania and is trusted by 600 contractors to manage over 80 million cubic meters per year.

"CONNECTED FOREST comprises a wide range of solutions that empowers organizations to manage the entire forest supply chain from planning, planting, transportation, and delivery"

The latest addition to the CONNECTED FOREST suite is CFXchange, a collaborative cloud solution that brings together supply data in one place for secure access by stakeholders in the forest industry supply chain. CFXchange offers complete supply chain transparency and seamless collaboration to a company. The solution empowers users with next-generation web applications to create personalized or shared views of data analytics, reports and key performance indicators to oversee and manage daily operations.

This not only reduces time and effort for data collection of paper load tickets but also helps monitor management forecasts and obtain geospatial views of harvest area maps for utmost improvement in supply chain productivity.

Intelligent Decision-Making all the Way

Needless to say given its comprehensive technology solutions, today Trimble is the solution of choice for forestry professionals worldwide and counts the likes of Rayonier, Metsä, and Canfor in their clientele. The case in point of Metsähallitus, a government enterprise managing the state-owned forests in Finland is the perfect example of Trimble’s unique value proposition. Today, the client leverages Trimble’s CONNECTED FOREST suite to manage their entire forestry business management from silvicultural operations, wood harvesting to log logistics. With Trimble, Metsähallitus specifically observed substantial benefits when it came to wood trade as the company was able to effortlessly streamline the 6 million cubic meters of wood that they dealt with every year.

Placing a customer-centric approach above everything, Trimble also offers a plethora of professional services where a team of experts guides clients through their projects for successful launch and maintenance. In case the situation demands, Trimble also offers proof of concepts to ensure the entire project lifecycle is based on a solid foundation and best practice consulting to determine how an organization can optimize their business processes. This includes project planning, requirements definition, testing and deployment, help desk, and web support. Overall, forest departments can expect to better use their time for value-added functions, observe decreased costs for forestry plan submissions, and faster turnaround time for business payments and invoicing. In case any gaps still persist, the company has provisions for outsourcing and custom development. These tailor-designed applications can stand alone as well as be integrated with the Trimble solutions suite.

Trusted World Over

Another added advantage of working with Trimble is their hosting solution. If a particular client doesn’t have the facilities or the resources to host and manage their solution on-premise, team Trimble can design and architect a scalable hosting solution. Apart from this, Trimble also provides consulting services around systems or modules, database, report design, and more. Since maps have been an essential part of forestry operations for decades, Trimble provides a variety of services and products related to spatial information: digital maps, routing information and geocoding. In addition, Trimble specialists can design any type of sophisticated spatial analysis solutions in line with a client’s specific needs.

Truly, such an extensive and holistic forest planning system was much-needed in the industry and even in the days to come Trimble CONNECTED FOREST will continue to shape and boost development in forest management. On an ending note, Berglund mentions, “Our recurring revenue demonstrated significant growth in our end-user markets and our ongoing transition to higher subscription content remains on course.”