Stratus and Prism Create Time for Us and Time for the Foresters

September 18, 2024

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Highlights

Hampton Lumber adopted Stratus and later added Prism to streamline data, inventory, and reporting during rapid growth. Together, the tools tripled productivity, cut processing time by up to 90%, and positioned the company to manage more acres with greater accuracy.

Stratus

Prism

Overview‍

In August 2021, Hampton Lumber adopted Stratus, Lim Geomatics’ (acquired by Remsoft) SaaS forest management and inventory system, to consolidate data and streamline processes during a time of major company growth. Since implementation, Stratus has saved time, optimized workflows, and standardized data, enabling the forestry team to increase its workload while reducing time for daily tasks, annual updates, and budgeting. Hampton added Prism, Lim Geo’s inventory data collection, analysis, and reporting solution, in 2022. Prism’s digital tools and automated processes integrated with Stratus’ activity management and monitoring have reduced the time spent by 80 to 90% for creating templates, assigning work, processing data, and monitoring contractors and foresters

About Hampton Lumber

Hampton Lumber is a family-owned, forest products company headquartered in Portland, Oregon. Aside from owning about 289,000 acres of Oregon and Washington forestland, Hampton Lumber manages approximately 300,000 acres of public and private forestland in British Columbia and operates ten sawmills across the Pacific Northwest. Its timberlands management team, based in Salem, consists of about 25 staff members.

Challenges

Fast Growth. In July 2021, Hampton Lumber’s timberlands ownership nearly doubled, and in the last few years, the company has roughly tripled the acreage it manages. While business expansion is a good problem to have, it requires innovative strategies for productivity, data management, and communication.
Lost Data and Knowledge. Long-term employees often build up encyclopedic knowledge about Hampton’s lands and operations. Without a centralized system for capturing and retaining that knowledge, retirements meant information loss for the company.
Inefficient Processes. With a large staff spread across multiple offices and states, work was submitted to the GIS team and upper management in a variety of formats, styles, and numerical units. This, explains GIS forester Britt Perkins, required “additional data manipulation and processing.” Plus, with data being stored in multiple formats and places, tracking down pertinent information was frustrating and time-consuming.
Land Management Challenges. As the company’s land base grew, so did the time needed to create maps and inventory data collection templates, distribute information to cruisers, manage contractors, and process cruise data. Making informed, real-time decisions was impossible due to time lags in communication and data analysis.

Objectives and Strategy

Hampton’s core forest management team had long been on the hunt for the right timberlands tracking platform, but none of the solutions they tried was a perfect fit. By 2020, company growth had heightened the need for a centralized source of standardized, accessible, and shareable information.

In early 2020, Perkins attended a webinar series about Lim Geo’s forestry software solutions. What could have been a simple story took an interesting turn when inventory manager Paul Lulay noticed a Yeti mug on Perkins’ desk—a gift for attending every episode of the series. Curious about the mug, Lulay asked Perkins where it had come from. With Lim Geomatics now on the company’s radar and Perkins in regular contact with Lim Geomatics’ Manager of Client Services, Alexander Ryerson, the pieces were in place for a new partnership.

Hampton officially adopted Stratus in August 2021. A collaborative onboarding process followed, with Hampton Lumber’s senior forest analyst, Ed Coulter, facilitating the transition. Currently, 25 foresters and field staff are using Stratus for activity planning, monitoring, archiving, and reporting. Some managers are using Stratus for broader analysis and predictive planning, and this usage is expected to increase. Upper management is enthusiastic about delving deeper into the platform’s automation and reporting capabilities.

Meanwhile, significant expansions to Hampton’s landbase prompted foresters to seek faster and more efficient methods to integrate inventory sampling projects, such as timber cruising, acquisition assessment, and seedling survival surveys, with their forest management system. In late 2022, they decided to adopt Prism, Lim Geomatics’ digital timber cruising solution. The Lim Geo team conducted an on-site training session in spring 2023, and by fall, field foresters were experiencing the benefits of using Prism. Prism is now the preferred data collection tool for their timberlands from plantation assessments to merchantable timber cruising and is expanding into acquisition evaluations.

Results

Major Cost and Time Savings. Despite the area managed by Hampton nearly tripling in recent years, its core forest management team has remained the same. This means the team has essentially tripled its productivity. Perkins and Lulay credit Stratus and Prism as the key factors in the team’s ability to successfully manage a much larger area, thereby enhancing the value of each forester and analyst.
Accurate, Accessible, Centralized Data. With the growth of the company, optimizing communication was crucial. “Stratus was a big tool in making that happen,” Lulay says. Stratus serves as a central repository for all Hampton’s forest asset data, ensuring consistency and empowering foresters to enter data in familiar formats while standardizing summaries and reports for upper management. This has led to reduced back-and-forth communication and fewer errors. Perkins adds that Stratus’ dynamic spatial and attribute filter tools make finding information faster and easier, replacing lengthy searches with just a few button clicks. With sustainable forest management at the top of everyone’s mind, Stratus was pivotal in assisting with Hampton’s SFI certification process. New GIS technician, Zack Kasson, describes Stratus as an excellent hub for learning the company’s workflows and operations, with its clear and straightforward UI making information more readily accessible.
Real-time Spatial Updates. Previously, Hampton relied on a static data set in which edits were only applied annually. Stratus, however, integrates tabular, spatial, and temporal data from a single source, enabling updates on spatial boundaries in real time. Having their activities layer related to the master stands layer removes the need for foresters to keep versioned copies of activities shapefiles. After implementing this system, Hampton has reduced their need to create and edit redundant layers thereby realizing significant time savings.
Future Planning and Tailored Reporting. A major component of Stratus’ value is its ability to not only document past activities but also “create a path forward for treatments that we would like to do,” says Lulay. The decision to undertake one activity impacts others downstream, and Stratus provides foresters that visibility to plan years in advance. Stratus allows users to auto-create future activities based on local forest management regimes, then schedule annual operations appropriately. Stratus reveals longer-term patterns and trends, enabling Hampton to use it for future volume and budget projections to truly make data-driven decisions. For Ed Coulter, Hampton’s senior forest analyst, Stratus’ filtering tools are invaluable, allowing him to filter information and export very specific reports in both spatial and tabular formats.
Quicker, Easier Sampling. Prism integrates seamlessly with Stratus and allows Hampton to set up multiple different sampling methods in one app, resulting in an easier and significantly faster process to plan sampling projects. The digital transmission of work assignments and automatic data synchronization with the office effectively streamlines communication on both ends. Perkins notes that faster information access allows her to answer data-related questions in real-time as soon as it syncs from the field. Hampton forester Patrick Boedigheimer reports that adopting Prism and Stratus coupled with Esri’s ArcGIS Dashboards has dramatically increased his productivity, enabling him to cover twice as many acres, manage more contractors, and reduce the time spent on data distribution and processing by 80 to 90%.

Testimonials

We’ve been successful in use of Stratus, then adding on Prism, and being able to accomplish the needs that come with managing so much ground.”
– Britt Perkins, GIS Forester , Hampton Lumber

I can manage where I’m going in Stratus, I can look at other people’s activities and do filters. It helps me figure out the most beneficial places to go, and once I know that in Stratus, I quickly log into Prism and use that information to create a Prism cruising project… It might take a tenth of the time. It is a significant improvement.”
– Paul Lulay, Inventory Manager , Hampton, Lumber

It is exciting and rewarding working with innovative companies like Hampton Lumber who are always looking for more efficient ways to do things with GIS technology.”
– Alexander Ryerson Manager of Client Services , Lim Geomatics