The forestry company Holmen has chosen Connected Forest from Trimble Forestry as the new forestry management system for Holmen Skog. ForestX will implement the system at Holmen.
Holmen is one of Sweden’s largest forest owners. The Holmen Skog business area is responsible for the management and development of the group’s land holdings, which amount to approximately 1.3 million hectares.
Holmen Skog will be the first in Sweden and Scandinavia to choose the Connected Forest suite from Trimble Forestry as a comprehensive forest management system. The background to choosing the Connected Forest suite is a strategic decision within Holmen to work more data-driven.
– Connected Forest gives us a platform where we can add more solutions and systems in the future. We have a lot of data. Now we have a platform that makes it possible to work data-driven in the long term, says Clas Engström, Head of Development at Holmen Skog.
– In Trimble, we have an active counterpart who continues to develop their software. We get impulses from Trimble for our own development.
At the same time, the change of business system represents a major change within Holmen Skog.
– It is not only an IT project. We are also looking at changing our own working methods. We have involved large parts of the business to find some new approaches and to work in new ways.
In summary, Clas Engström sees two main objectives in the project:
– The first is that we acquire a new operational system and improve and change our working methods. The second is that we get a platform that technically enables us to work more data-driven in an extension and enables us to take further steps in the future. It gives us the opportunity to manage data in a flexible way in the long term, to have control and to know in what format the data will come.
Collaboration partner with Trimble Forestry
ForestX is Trimble Forestry’s partner in the Scandinavian market. This is the first Connected Forest project in Scandinavia. Clas Engström sees great value in having ForestX involved in the work.
– ForestX is close to us and knows forestry in Sweden and Scandinavia. For example, it will be a great advantage to be able to speak Swedish in these major development steps.
– This is our business system, which is obviously a central part of the company. It is our single biggest project right now. It’s an ambitious project, and we’re putting a lot into it, he says.
The project involves implementing LRM and CFHarvest from the Connected Forest suite.
CFHarvest is currently used by Sydved, another large Swedish forest company. ForestX was responsible for the implementation at Sydved, so there is experience of the system in Swedish conditions. However, Holmen will be the first in Scandinavia to use LRM, a service for managing basic forestry data and GIS information.
We are working to understand how LRM works. At the same time, we want to look at new ways of working and what is theoretically possible in relation to the program. That thinking is going on right now. We are looking at adaptations together with ForestX, says Clas Engström
Modern solutions with AI
For ForestX, the project with Holmen means that the company can now offer the entire Swedish forest industry a modern and powerful system that supports all business processes.
– We see this as the start of our customers getting a modern solution and a long-term partnership that supports the companies in the change that is on the doorstep in a number of areas. For example, it is about external requirements for modern forestry and the opportunity to use new technologies such as AI, says ForestX’s marketing manager Christer Lindqvist.
All parties see the project as the start of a far-reaching and long-term partnership. At the turn of the year 2024/2025, the part with LRM and CFHarvest will be ready to be put into operation.
– We will be the first to reach out to customers with this. We hope that we can meet them a little smarter and more efficiently. It will be more work for us, but we will be the first. It feels good and we are well on our way, says Clas Engström.
Fact box
Holmen is one of Sweden’s largest forest owners. We manage the forest actively and sustainably to make sure it grows optimally, giving us the best raw material. Adopting a long-term view, we take responsibility for the forest ecocycle from seed to replanting while safeguarding biodiversity. Our employees manage our forests, buy wood and help private forest owners with harvesting and silviculture.
ForestX offers digital solutions and business knowledge for the entire forest value chain, from forest to finished product. ForestX has well-known forestry and sawmill companies in Sweden, Denmark and Central Europe as customers.
In 2023, ForestX was named Gasell 2023 by Dagens Industri for its rapid and healthy growth.
One third of ForestX’s employees have a forestry education. Together with experienced solution architects and developers, there is a great knowledge of the needs of the forestry industry and digital solutions. ForestX has a network of partners and specialists who complement the work of digitizing the forest industry.
ForestX collaborates with world-leading product suppliers. The company currently has about fifty coworkers in Gothenburg, Dalarna, Uppsala, Växjö and Pune, India. ForestX also has employees on site for customers in Germany and Austria.
ForestX is the Scandinavian partner of Trimble Forestry, which provides the Connected Forest suite.
Trimble Forestry has 250 employees worldwide. Trimble Forestry has offices in Canada, USA, Brazil, New Zealand, Finland and Germany. Trimble Forestry is part of Trimble Inc.
Trimble Forestry is a leading provider of technology solutions for the forest industry. The company focuses on providing innovative tools and systems to streamline forest management and increase productivity in the forest industry.
Trimble Forestry provides the Connected Forest suite.
The Connected Forest suite includes, for example, functions for machine GIS, harvesting and forest management planning, logistics, contracts, price calculation, settlement and invoicing.
The Connected Forest modules can be used individually or together to digitize several steps. The services are delivered as SoftWare As A Service (SaaS) and are built with modern technology. For example, there are functions for machine GIS, planning of harvesting and forest management, logistics, contracts, price calculation, settlement and invoicing.
Land Resource Manager (LRM) is an intuitive and simple SAAS service for the management of land data and GIS data for organizations working with real estate and forestry data. LRM handles all the critical functions of land and forest resource planning, and can provide decision support with a fairly wide range of customizability. This allows customers to adapt the tool to their particular business and workflows.
LRM is tightly integrated with the other applications in the Connected Forest product suite, providing an easy way to monitor mission-critical information from all parts of the business.
