Cloud-based Operations Software Offers Significant ROI for Wood Mills

If you’re operating your wood mill using manual, paper-based processes, you’re incurring needless costs while missing out on additional revenue.

Our team here at Legna has seen firsthand the savings and revenue increases our customers achieve after switching to the right cloud-based operations software for their wood mills.

How much can you gain financially from digitally transforming your operations? Below we share a breakdown of the savings and new income you can expect after implementing our Angel software solution for wood mills.

Cost Savings From Efficient Digital Processes

When you collect paper-based load and scale tickets, you typically spend 8–10 hours per week in administrative time on ticket reconciliation and procurement accounting.

You can save that time (and money) when you implement the Angel platform, which automatically reconciles load and scale e-tickets and calculates all settlement amounts as soon as a truckload is weighed in.

What may be even more valuable to you is avoiding the aggravation and errors inherent in paper-based work.

At Vicksburg Forest Products in Vicksburg, Mississippi, the staff especially appreciate these benefits. “We have very few corrections because the platform already has all the relevant information,” plant controller Steve Kitchens says. “This saves our company money, time and headaches.”

You can also expect other savings from switching to digital, cloud-based processes, including:

• Savings of approximately four hours per week for procurement staff by giving them the ability to work together from anywhere
• Average time/efficiency savings of 15% across all functions
  

In addition, you save money by preventing fraud. The Angel app geotags timber loads as they’re created so that you can be certain where your loads came from. As such, you can prevent your contracted loggers or truckers from zone jumping (fraudulently representing the zone from which timber came to charge an inflated price). Our customers save up to $10 per ton by ensuring log security.

Increased Revenue From Operational Visibility and Insights

Another problem with paper-based load tickets is that your procurement team lacks visibility into the tonnage and types of wood products being sent from your tracts to other mills until the loggers deliver their load and scale tickets to your mill. This is often at least a week after the loggers completed the merchandising of your tract.

In contrast, with a digital process, your loaders create a trackable e-ticket in the field for each load—as a result, your procurement staff have real-time, ongoing visibility into where these loads go.

If a trucker is delivering a wood product to a mill that pays less for that product than another mill does, you can notify the appropriate field personnel to correct the error before more loads go to the wrong destination.

By gaining control over the logger merchandising process in this way, our customers typically gain a revenue increase of 5%. Depending on your volume, a 5% gain could mean hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars in new revenue for your mill.

In addition, the Angel platform provides a dashboard of operational metrics, including data showing which tracts or sections of your land are most profitable. These metrics may enable you to further optimize operations or identify either opportunities for savings or new revenue.

Interested in Seeing How Else Your Mill Operations Can Improve?

To learn more about how you can digitally transform your operations at your mill for improved profitability, contact us or request our e-book “How Wood Mills Can Increase Profitability Through Digital Transformation.”