Remsoft announced that a new Transportation Scheduling module will be available by mid-year for Remsoft Operations, the company’s cloud-powered operational planning system for forestry. The new module adds capabilities for assigning fleets to road-side inventory, and creating delivery schedules from the unit to the mill.
Launched in 2018, Remsoft Operations targets coordination challenges across forest operations planning and scheduling. Key among these are lack of visibility into critical and connected planning activity – roads, harvest, transportation, wood flow, inventory and contract management – and the fragmentation of planning information which resides in separate spreadsheets, schedules and systems, making it difficult to source and share data to drive time-sensitive decisions.
Remsoft Operations centralizes and makes all harvest, delivery and destination information instantly accessible via an intuitive and web-based interface, creating a unified view of the forest supply chain that supports collaborative, real-time planning and scheduling. Integration with Esri’s ArcGIS web platform drives the value of spatial analytics across forestry operations, enabling organizations to view their plans on maps to simplify scheduling and identify efficiencies.
“Hundreds of global users, across different teams, are now actively planning and scheduling with Remsoft Operations, and the system is being used to manage thousands of harvest units and several millions of tons of fibre,” said Doug Jones, Remsoft Senior Vice President, Client Solutions and Innovation. “It’s been exciting to see our vision become reality and the addition of Transportation Scheduling takes us one step further towards digital enablement and modernization of the forestry supply chain.”
The new Transportation Scheduling module builds on the powerful crew scheduling and allocation planning functionality within Remsoft Operations, enabling transportation planners to assign fleets to roadside inventory and create delivery schedules from the unit to the mill.
With the ability to define fleet capacity and the cycle-times between units and destinations, planners can create transportation schedules that accurately display both the daily product volume expected at a mill and the number of days it will take a transportation fleet to complete a delivery assignment.
Detailed haul costs can be tracked to allow planners to balance and compare the financial impact of transportation and delivery decisions, providing managers with a better understanding of the impact of transportation on the overall profit margin for a harvest unit.
The ability to leverage Remsoft’s industry-standard optimization models is an underlying strength of Remsoft Operations, enabling organizations to solve complex scheduling problems such as annual planning, log allocation, woodflow and crew scheduling. The new Transportation Scheduling module adds to this by allowing users to automatically create optimized transportation schedules.
As with all Remsoft Operations modules, collaboration support and automated variance tracking are built-in attributes. The results of transportation scheduling can be viewed across the organization with accessible graphs, dashboards and maps, and planned delivered volumes and revenues can be compared against actuals.
“Forestry supply chains are complex and dynamic,” says Jones. “Planners need to be able to compare different scenarios to help find the best path forward, view and analyze the impact of changes to the harvest and delivery schedules – and make adjustments. This is true for forest operations of all sizes, and Remsoft Operations, with its cloud architecture and modular design, can scale to any company’s needs.”