Digitalisation in wood logistics

Heiner Höfkes: The effects of the infestation with bark beetles can be clearly seen and felt in our forests. Spruce trees have suffered particularly badly as a result. This poses a huge problem for the wood industry, because most of the sawmills in Germany work with spruce timber: the trees grow quickly and are straight and are therefore ideal for the machines used in the sawmill industry. However, if a tree is infested with bark beetles, it has to be harvested as quickly as possible – and that is usually much earlier than when the tree should have been cut down.

80 million cubic metres of wood are felled in Germany every year – so-called ‘calamity wood’ recently accounted for about half of this figure, that is to say, wood that had been infested with bark beetles. In contrast to what people perhaps assume, wood attacked by bark beetles can still be used by almost all industries. The material is in great demand abroad too: we’ve exported more timber than ever to Asia and the USA during the last few years. The Rhenus Group has operated a large number of wood transport services in the field of export logistics as a result.

Heiner Höfkes: Bruno Reimann has its headquarters in the Harz region, an area in Germany with many forests, and it handles the complete wood supply cycle. The company’s employees buy the piles of wood directly from the local forestry companies – that is to say, the huge stacks of wood from tree trunks that have been cut down, which you normally see at the side of a footpath if you go for a walk in a forest. The firm then transports the logs from the forest by truck directly to the customer or to rail services or to a port. These modes of transport are much more sustainable for fairly long distances than road services. The special thing here is that Bruno Reimann has three of its own railway sidings and ships 3,000 goods wagons to Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, Poland and Austria from there every year. This saves about 1.8 million kilometres of empty journeys by truck every year – which corresponds to a traffic jam that is 930 kilometres long or the distance between Oberammergau in the Allgäu region to Wilhelmshaven on the North Sea coast.

Heiner Höfkes: We use an app that we’ve developed in-house to administer orders and the piles of wood; as a result, we can manage the quantities of wood stored in forests in a better way and also communicate with our drivers and send them orders. The individual piles of wood are entered or loaded into the app system with numbers, GPS coordinates and the relevant quantity of wood. As a result, we generate what you might call a ‘digital map’, which also displays the drivers’ own location and the small footpaths through the forest. It’s possible for them to find their way through the forest at any time because the app works offline too. The various quantities and storage areas are combined within the app to form an order and are sent to the drivers – so that each of them knows the exact route and quantity of wood that they should pick up. The drivers then enter the quantities that they’ve loaded on board their trucks in the system.

The app is also connected to the telematic data of each vehicle, that is to say, the truck can send information about its own location, for example, or communicate with the digital system about how much wood has currently been loaded. While somebody is loading the truck, the vehicle can therefore provide an update about whether the wood is located where it’s supposed to be according to the plan and also pass on the information that the crane is currently loading wood.  

Heiner Höfkes: It’s true that there are already many different systems and digital freight forwarding services in the market, but none of these options has yet revolutionised the market or fully met our requirements. We not only offer our clients logistics services, but also take over all the services associated with purchasing and trading in wood as a raw material. That’s the reason why we’ve developed our own app and we use it to manage our quantities of wood and the journeys made by trucks.  

There are now even apps available which you can use to take a photo of a pile of wood and it then directly calculates the volume of the tree trunks that are located there for you. Some harvesting machines are also equipped with digital features: when they cut down a tree, debranch a tree trunk or remove the bark, for example, they can also directly measure its diameter – so that foresters know exactly how much wood they’ve harvested and can then pass on this information to us as the logistics specialist. These could be the next stages for integrating operations. Initial attempts are also already being made for drones to fly through a forest; they can then recognise how many trees are standing in the forestry district and can therefore measure the volume of the tree trunks. With this information, it’s possible to determine the supplies or quantities of wood that have been harvested more precisely and quickly. This procedure makes it easier to calculate processes and plan the logistics work.  

Heiner Höfkes: Trucks as a means of transport are indispensable in wood logistics because they’re the only mode of transport that offers the possibility of transporting wood as a raw material from forests quickly and without any complications. Generally speaking, analogue procedures still dominate much of the work in truck logistics. However, there’ll be significant ongoing developments to digitalise the processes, both in truck and in wood logistics, during the next few years.

For example, experts are trying to develop a tree trunk recognition system – that it to say, a kind of digital fingerprint along the supply chain. This makes it possible to track where the tree grew, where it was transported to and at which place it was last processed at any time. There are even pairs of spectacles that work in a similar manner to VR glasses and make it easier for drivers to load the tree trunks. They remain seated comfortably in their cab and put on these glasses, which are connected to a camera on the crane. Because the camera image is transferred to the glasses, the drivers can see everything from their cab as if they were sitting up on the crane and loading the tree trunks from there. This is very practical, particularly in bad weather. Especially in the light of the shortage of drivers in the sector, the next step would then involve truck drivers making their way to the pile of wood in the forest, having their lunch break there, while somebody from the office can use the technology to load the vehicle at the same time. This eases the burden on drivers and the general processes function more efficiently. However, we don’t believe that the system has been fully developed yet. The quality of the digital networks in many regions isn’t adequate yet either.

We believe that there’ll be significant development potential for Rhenus Forest Logistics in future too. By acquiring Bruno Reimann, we’re continuing to expand our capabilities in the field of wood logistics and are penetrating the value-added chain even more deeply. We can then offer our clients even better services. From a technical point of view, our goal is clearly to digitalise the processes without any kinds of gaps. However, we naturally remain curious to see how the technology within the sector will develop during the next few years and decades and what kinds of requirements our clients will need us to meet – but we’ll definitely have some solutions!