From shelter, furniture or fruits to the stories that grew around trees, woods are part of life, so much more than a mere material resource.
Challenges of the timber industry
As far as sustainable forestry operations go, a lot of work is needed to balance resource management with the best care for biodiversity.
For a long time, forestry operations were largely performed manually, but until recently the scope for further improvements to the tools that were used had become very limited.
The forces driving automation are: a lack of workers, the aspiration to conduct forestry operations year-round and for more hours per day, a desire to reduce costs, the amount of hard physical work involved, and the lead-times between logging and industrial processing.
TTC Stock Control Technology
TTC Chile is a company dedicated to offering products and services that respond to the requirements and problems of different industries, but mostly in the forest industry. One of their areas of expertise is the field of Inventory Control. Thanks to their association with national and international companies, like CountThings, they offer the best personalized, efficient, fast and safe alternatives for their clients.
CountThings from Photos app integration
The TTC Stock Control App for Android is especially designed to solve the problem of volume calculation in the forest. The app takes information from CountThings, such as log count, diameters or volume, then convert it into reports used for inventory and resource management.
The Stock Control With Cameras for Windows is ideal for controlling inventory at the plant entrance, using camera photo captures and then processing them.
CountThings from Photos is the application that labels each log and measures their diameters. This has helped improve the processes for forest management companies, because it enables fast and cost-effective counting. It also has the benefit of safety measures, as workers are not exposed to having an accident working near the piles while doing the counting and measurements.
CountThings from Photos offers many integration options and TTC uses one of them for their Stock Control App. Both help clients to associate their wood (timbers) inventory with forest information and calculations. This is very complementary because the forestry industry needs more specific data.
Using Machine Learning applied to Computer Vision, the software identifies and counts the logs, measures volume and diameter and records the results. The information can be viewed in the cloud and downloaded.
TTC has a lot of clients in the forestry sector, one of them being Arauco a well known company that specializes in wood based products in a sustainable manner. Automation and digitalization help Arauco be more efficient at an operational level.