The forestry industry is changing towards digitalization, precision, and automation

At the forefront of this change, there are photo-optical wood volume measuring apps like Wood Watcher, an AI-powered Optical Volume Measurement app.

Traditional vs Wood Watcher:

1. Manual Method: For each log, you measure the diameter with forestry calipers (once or twice at 90 degrees), you adjust for bark (or not), you measure the length using a measuring tape and plug into a simple volume formula (a cylinder or a truncated cone) for ex: Pi/4 x R x R x L.
2. Manual Method: For pulpwood and fuelwood you measure the dimensions of the apparent volume and multiply with a density factor (ex: 60%, effectively ignoring the air gaps) for ex: L x W x H x density
3. Very advanced methods like harvester measuring, laser measuring, or factory measuring require either specialized or expensive equipment and are not easily accessible everywhere.
4. Wood Watcher method: You take a correct photo of the woodpile (including a known reference), plug in the length of the logs, and select the volume formula.

What are your benefits when using Wood Watcher?

1. Time efficiency. Time is the most important factor in any business. Manually measuring a woodpile or wood transport truck takes anywhere from 30 minutes to 120 minutes, but with Wood Watcher, it takes under 1 minute.
2. Costs savings. Manual methods require significant manpower – you have a least a crane operator and one (or two) employees to measure for 30-120 minutes. Wood Watcher works with only 1 person (ex: the crane operator) for 1 minute.
3. Instant report generation. Forget manually entering wood diameters using pen and paper or excel data input. Wood Watcher generates a basic .csv file or excel .xlsx file or .pdf file instantly.
4. Reduce human input error. We are human and we make mistakes when measuring, when inputting data or when reporting data. When using Wood Watcher all human errors are minimized.
5. Satisfied and confident customers. Wood is bought and sold and both sellers/suppliers and buyers need to be able to measure and verify each other’s claims, otherwise, commercial tensions will be created. Using Wood Watcher is easy for you to measure objectively as many times as needed and use that measurement as undeniable proof resulting in strong commercial relationships.
6. Data sharing. Compliance audit. Real-time inventory overview. Digital Transformation. Using existing non-scalable tools for data sharing is ok up to a point when coordination of the flow of information becomes a burden. With Wood Watcher, you can seamlessly share data between your systems and store the data in the Cloud making it easily accessible and retrievable anywhere within your business.

In conclusion

Use Wood Watcher to get automation, digitalization, precision, confidence, transparency, traceability and objectivity when measuring wood!

Get it here