Optimisation of wood logistics

The effectiveness of the logging industry is assumed to be dependent, first of all, on such factors as stable demand, high enough prices for the products, the characteristics of forest stands, technologies used, and prices for fuel. These factors are definitely of key significance. At the same time, logging companies have limited influence on them. By contrast, a number of possibilities might enhance the effectiveness of the work that, in our opinion, receives insufficient attention from most Russian loggers. We are talking about the optimal organisation of internal business processes. The proper organisation of those processes – in accordance with up-to-date approaches and new techniques – could significantly cut organisational costs and enhance the effectiveness of both production processes and their management. In this respect, one of the most promising areas is introducing up-to-date logistics methods into logging organisations. This might produce good results when solving such issues as ensuring effective transportation logistics, developing the forest road infrastructure, or optimising harvesting plans. Searching for effective solutions to the logistics issues of roundwood and residues has become considerably more urgent in Russia over recent years. First, this is determined by the increasing volumes of harvesting with cut-to-lenght technologies. The northwest region is the most active in applying this technology, which dramatically complicates searching for an optimal transportation plan because of a lack of central processing yards in the classical scheme and the significant increase in the range of wood assortments at sites. All this leads to the low effectiveness of standard transportation schemes. Owing to the complexity of the task, the production of more effective plans is possible only if modern logistics methods are used with special software. A hybrid approach came up with a two-stage transportation solution because of the unwillingness to solve the matter as well as for other reasons. In the first stage, all logs are delivered from harvesting sites to a processing yard, and then, after secondary sorting, they are taken to customers. The yard can significantly increase costs for transporting one cubic metre of wood, because the total distance of transportation from the harvesting site to the yard and further from the yard to the customer will always be longer than is the distance of direct transportation from the site to the customer. In addition, there are also costs for reloading and storing wood, maintaining loading depots, and so on. Therefore, usable logistics methods could increase the effectiveness of wood transportation.