German forestry company Cambium-Forstbetriebe won a Computerworld Honours 21st Century Achievement award in the category of manufacturing for its innovative lumber management system which uses Progress-based technology from application partner DABAC.
The Computerworld honours awards, presented in Washington, DC, recognise the world`s most creative and innovative uses of information technology in society. Case studies from the 2005 Computerworld honours collection are available at http://www.cwheroes.org, the official site of the Computerworld Honors Program.
In addition, nine other Progress customers were named laureates of the programme, including Interactive Taxi (for its "cybercabs" which allow taxi passengers to access the Internet) and Fractal Technologies (enabling interactive 3D viewing of disparate geological, geochemical and geophysical data). Eight of the applications were built using the award-winning Progress OpenEdge platform, which has itself received accolades for its high productivity, robust functionality and minimal ongoing IT staff requirements.
The German forestry industry is one of the largest in the world. Yet, transporting timber from Germany`s forests to sawmills can be a disruptive, multi-party process involving many steps, companies and regulations.
Cambium-Forstbetriebe, Germany`s largest independent forest management company, was suffering from inventory shrinkage and an inefficient and time consuming payment process. To create a better way to track trees while maximising the value of the lumber, Cambium-Forstbetriebe implemented a comprehensive information system from Progress partner DABAC that includes an enterprise resource planning application on the OpenEdge platform, integration between the forestry companies and sawmills made possible by Sonic Software, and RFID technology from the Progress Real Time Division to track trees from the cutting site to the sawmill.
"When we put the logs on the truck, we can scan the logs exactly as they are tagged in the forest. Subsequently, the sawmill can prepare its production according to the quality of the individual logs and the total number of logs that will be received," says Dr Michael Gross, MD, DABAC. "The result is that forestry companies can be assured that they will be properly compensated based on the exact amount and quality of the logs provided, and the sawmill will be prepared ahead of time for the cutting requirements of the incoming inventory. As an additional benefit to the natural resources, tree harvesting will be optimised. Nothing has been lost, and the quality of the whole process is greatly enhanced."
The DABAC system strengthens Cambium-Forstbetriebe`s top and bottom lines by significantly increasing inventory accuracy to more than 90%, improving timber quality through optimisation of the supply chain, and assuring that the forestry company will be compensated on the quality of the logs provided and not an average price per log. The automated tracking process also eliminates manual reconciliation between various systems and accelerates accounting accuracy and customer payments. "With Progress technology, we`ve created the ultimate application for the forest industry," says Gerhard Friemel, owner of Cambium-Forstbetriebe.
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