{"id":446772,"date":"2021-07-13T07:12:03","date_gmt":"2021-07-13T14:12:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/?post_type=blog&#038;p=446772"},"modified":"2022-03-28T15:35:29","modified_gmt":"2022-03-28T22:35:29","slug":"north-carolina-lumber-mill-takes-guesswork-out-of-operations-with-gis","status":"publish","type":"blog","link":"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/about\/newsroom\/blog\/north-carolina-lumber-mill-takes-guesswork-out-of-operations-with-gis","title":{"rendered":"North Carolina Lumber Mill Takes Guesswork Out of Operations with GIS"},"author":7572,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"sync_status":"","episode_type":"","audio_file":"","podmotor_file_id":"","podmotor_episode_id":"","castos_file_data":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[801],"tags":[14842,463161,162582,474142],"industry":[],"esri-blog-category":[478382],"esri_blog_department":[478182],"class_list":["post-446772","blog","type-blog","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-operational-intelligence","tag-efficiency","tag-fieldwork","tag-forestry","tag-logging","esri-blog-category-forestry","esri_blog_department-natural-resources"],"acf":{"video_source":"","video_start":"","video_stop":"","short_description":"Culp Lumber made the shift from desktop GIS to online GIS to achieve efficiency gains in the forest.","pdf":{"host_remotely":false,"file":"","file_url":""},"flexible_content":[{"acf_fc_layout":"sidebar","layout":"standard","image_reference":null,"image_reference_figure":"","spotlight_image":null,"section_title":"","spotlight_name":"","position":"Right","content":"Culp Lumber has embraced the enhanced workflows that online GIS makes possible to improve assessment, cutting, and hauling of lumber.\r\n\r\nKey Takeaways\r\n<ul>\r\n \t<li>Foresters use ruggedized GPS devices to map details about trees in the woods.<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Back in the office, location information is analyzed to determine the profitability of logging each forest tract.<\/li>\r\n \t<li>Culp Lumber achieves improved awareness from a shared map.<\/li>\r\n<\/ul>","snippet":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"The southern yellow pine forests across the southeastern United States provide the country\u2019s primary source of construction lumber. The wood is strong and dense, and it holds nails well. It was also plentiful and cheap, until the recent pandemic-related home remodeling trend. In response to increased demands, lumber companies are running mills at capacity, while reveling in a 280 percent price spike after many lean years.\r\n\r\nThat demand hasn\u2019t dulled efforts by one lumber company to keep designing better ways of doing business. The company has remained committed to sustainability by using high-tech methods in a decidedly analog place\u2014the forest. In an industry accustomed to slim profit margins, H.W. Culp Lumber Company, based in New London, North Carolina, has been using location intelligence to make more informed decisions about where it harvests and how far it will drive to get the lumber it needs as fuel costs rise.\r\n\r\n\u201cWhen you\u2019re buying [and transporting] a half million tons a year, that becomes real money, really quick,\u201d said Chris Charest, procurement forester at Culp Lumber.\r\n\r\nThe latest technology adoption comes years after the fourth-generation family-owned business, in operation since 1915, first automated its mill operations in the mid-1980s. And it continued to focus on increased efficiencies and new technologies to survive the Great Recession that began in late 2007.\r\n\r\nWhen logs get to the mill, machines take over\u2014independently scanning, assessing, and sorting to maximize profits.\r\n\r\n\u201cOnce it's in the mill\u2014unless there's something that goes totally haywire\u2014a human doesn't make a decision,\u201d said Charest. \u201cThe computer will cut a 16-foot board in half if it will make a penny or more difference in price.\u201d The resultant products include yellow pine lumber, timbers, boards, and by-products, including sawdust, shavings, and chips.\r\n\r\nEvery part of the tree is valuable, but there\u2019s a greater value for a #1 board with its dense grain pattern and smaller, tighter knots. A computer at the mill does the grading, using machine vision to assess and sort boards at a pace of 150 pieces per minute.\r\n\r\nCharest marvels at the efficiency gains in the mill and sweats the tight margins in his role as procurement forester. Now, he\u2019s working to tie a modern geographic information system (GIS) to location-aware apps to streamline workflows in the forest\u2014from assessing to cutting to hauling. The field apps collect data, feeding the analysis of forests to determine if a specific timber stand can be logged profitably. A lot of that comes down to the miles of travel."},{"acf_fc_layout":"gallery","gallery_images":[446842,446852,446802]},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"<h3><strong>Feeding the Mill<\/strong><\/h3>\r\nThe Culp Lumber mill operates four-and-a-half days a week with continuous sawing for 10 hours per day. Before the Great Recession, the mill produced 425,000 board feet per day, and now they produce 700,000. To keep up with the pace of production, 100 tractor trailer loads of pine sawlogs are required every day.\r\n\r\nThankfully, this part of the country has plenty of supply. Even though Culp Lumber harvests trees only within a 100-mile radius of its mill, the pace of pine growth and the amount of pine forest in the area can more than keep up.\r\n\r\n\u201cWe\u2019re seeing the benefits of the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.fsa.usda.gov\/programs-and-services\/conservation-programs\/conservation-reserve-program\/index\">Conservation Reserve Program<\/a> when the federal government paid landowners to take land out of agriculture production and put it in trees, Charest said. \u201cAnd the trees are growing faster than we're cutting them right now.\u201d"},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image":446832,"image_position":"center","orientation":"horizontal","hyperlink":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"The Culp family owns several thousand acres of forest that provides some of the wood it mills, but the bulk of it is bought from other landowners in a process that involves sealed bidding. The landowner sets the sale date and provides a map of the tract that the bidders appraise. On the date and time of the sale, the bids are opened and the highest one gets to log the tract.\r\n\r\nCharest manages a group of five foresters who look at the trees in a process called <em>timber cruising<\/em> to find the right logs within the shortest distance.\r\n\r\n\u201cWe generate cruise points with systematic spacing for every forest we evaluate, and we can manipulate the layout on the computer through GIS before we leave the office, so we know what we\u2019re going to do before we hit the woods,\u201d Charest said.\r\n\r\nBecause Culp Lumber specializes in yellow pine, Charest looks to buy tracts with 60 percent or greater of the species. Out in the forest, each worker measures trees at the center of the plot, recording the diameter, height, species of the trees, and the stem quality. The statistical measurements of trees are then fed into a program back in the office to generate lumber volumes that Charest uses to determine the value for the stand of timber.\r\n<h3><strong>Awareness to Improve Trucking Costs<\/strong><\/h3>\r\nOne of the next workflows Charest is addressing is to pass along maps to the loggers so they can see boundary lines and know where they are on a tract of land. The aim is to ensure that all (and only) trees bought get harvested. \u201cCutting over on someone else's timber gets expensive,\u201d Charest said.\r\n\r\nMost logging crews are down to a three or four-person operation with heavy equipment. The feller buncher is the cutting machine with a big saw head that can drive through a tree, pick it up and lay it down in bunches. Then the skidder picks up the bunch and drags it to where the loader will delimb it and throw it on a truck.\r\n\r\nCulp Lumber knows when a truck has been loaded and how many logs are coming in. But routing the trucks and paying the drivers for the miles they\u2019ve driven required the more detailed maps that GIS produces. A recent data upgrade with the location of low-weight bridges made a big difference in trucking costs.\r\n\r\n\u201cIf we pay 15 cents a ton-mile,\u201d Charest continued, \u201clet\u2019s say we buy a tract of timber, and it\u2019s 40 miles back to the mill. That\u2019s 40 times 15 cents for $6 a ton. If there\u2019s a low-weight bridge, we\u2019re legally not allowed to cross it. So if it\u2019s 10 miles to go around it, all of a sudden, I have to add $1.50 per ton to the delivery price. If the tract is 10,000 tons, then it\u2019s going to cost us $15,000 more because of one low-weight bridge.\u201d"},{"acf_fc_layout":"image","image":446872,"image_position":"center","orientation":"horizontal","hyperlink":""},{"acf_fc_layout":"content","content":"Charest always has a calculator close at hand because the delivery price is crucial to answering his key procurement question, \u201cWhat am I willing to pay?\u201d Calculating trucking costs correctly before the timber is bought allows him to determine what he can pay the landowner and still make a profit.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe ability to build a special routing program based on the parameters that we need for our log trucks became huge for us,\u201d Charest said. \u201cAs fuel rates go up and the truck driver shortage grows, miles are going to become more important to companies.\u201d\r\n<h3><strong>Forest and The Family<\/strong><\/h3>\r\nCulp Lumber participated in the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) for 15 years and credits the process with instilling good procurement practices that it continues to follow.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe intent is to keep it a family-run mill, so we are concerned about the longevity and availability of the product in our wood basket,\u201d Charest said. The <em>wood basket<\/em>\u00a0refers to Culp\u2019s harvest area as well as the whole southern states, which have been producing lumber for centuries. The wood basket region stretches from eastern Texas to Maryland, and it produces 60 percent of the country\u2019s wood products.\r\n\r\nThe US timber industry lost more than 70,000 jobs after the Great Recession. Mills closed, and those that were still running operated at limited capacity. At Culp Lumber, the family-oriented focus helped get it through the tough times with everyone pitching in to find efficiencies and scrape out a profit to keep everyone employed.\r\n\r\n\u201cThis is a real family-oriented culture,\u201d Charest said. \u201cWe have 40-year employees, 30-year employees, 20-year employees. We have employees that started working here before they got out of high school, and they don't go anywhere until they retire.\u201d\r\n\r\nThe culture provided motivation and kept everyone asking how to improve throughput and profit in the mill. The latest wave of change in process at Culp Lumber involves digitalization to bring information together to tell a complete story and involve the entire staff.\r\n\r\n\u201cA lot of information is kept in my head and my boss\u2019s head, and the owner recently asked what would happen if (we) \u2018met the beer truck\u2019 one day,\u201d Charest said, referring to their untimely demise. \u201cThe answer was, \u2018that would be a very bad day for Culp Lumber.' So, now we\u2019re looking at how to bring everything together so everyone in the organization understands what\u2019s going on.\u201d\r\n\r\nCharest has embraced modern GIS and the location intelligence it delivers, providing enhanced employee awareness through a shared map. He hopes to bring similar efficiency gains to the procurement side of the business as the company has seen in the mill.\r\n\r\n\u201cI\u2019m starting to track bids we lost and going back to run the analysis on why we lost them,\u201d Charest said. \u201cBefore, we just threw them in a drawer. We\u2019re making the information more readily available and usable so we can look for any little advantage because at the volumes we\u2019re running, every little thing you do can translate to huge numbers.\u201d\r\n\r\nLearn more about how <a href=\"https:\/\/www.esri.com\/en-us\/industries\/natural-resources\/segments\/forestry\">GIS helps maximize the value of timber assets<\/a>."},{"acf_fc_layout":"sidebar","layout":"standard","image_reference":null,"image_reference_figure":"","spotlight_image":null,"section_title":"","spotlight_name":"","position":"Center","content":"<h2><strong>Keeping Pace with Technology<\/strong><\/h2>\r\nEarly in Chris Charest\u2019s role as the procurement forester for H.W. Culp Lumber Company, he embraced the digitization of field workflows using ruggedized GPS receivers. He knew the workflow he wanted, and he did some coding with the help of tech-savvy college friends to craft a tool to find the right logs within the shortest distance. And the tool has worked well for decades.\r\n\r\nRecently, the hardware platform it was built on had been retired, so Charest looked around for a new solution. He knew they couldn\u2019t go back to the old way of using graph paper.\r\n\r\n\u201cI contacted several other software companies because I thought Esri was too big of a company to mess with a small forestry company,\u201d Charest said. \u201cI didn\u2019t realize what the new products can do or the level of support Esri offers small companies. Our account manager and technical consultant really took the time to understand where we wanted to go as a company and delivered us better solutions than I ever thought were possible when I started this process.\u201d\r\n\r\nMaking the shift from desktop GIS to Esri\u2019s software as a service (SaaS) offering through ArcGIS Online offered a new level of capabilities that employees can access anywhere and anytime.\r\n\r\n\u201cThe ability for foresters to connect their ruggedized GPS tablet means they can just download the data and go,\u201d Charest said. \u201cThey don\u2019t need to drive two hours to start their day or to bring the data back to me. The online tools allow me to track the production of all my workers as well as to confirm they are properly doing the work in the woods. We also have the ability to distribute the data throughout the organization.\u201d\r\n\r\nAs in the past, Charest is tuning apps to meet his exact requirements, but now, he just reconfigures parameters rather than doing any hard coding. Dashboard functions have him intrigued, and he\u2019s working to make the most of upcoming drone technology. The ability to conduct volume estimates and generate reports with drones has piqued his curiosity.\r\n\r\n\u201cI kind of rested on my laurels about what technology was out there, and I got comfortable,\u201d Charest said. \u201cI kick myself now for not asking questions earlier.\u201d","snippet":""}],"references":null},"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v25.9 (Yoast SEO v25.9) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>North Carolina Lumber Mill Takes Guesswork Out of Operations with GIS<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Culp Lumber is working to replicate the automation efficiencies it achieved in its mills in the more difficult field environment of the forest.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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