New functionality in the latest release of Woodstock Scheduler takes crew movement costs into consideration to optimize harvest crew scheduling decisions and reduce costs associated with operational planning.
Remsoft recently announced a new release of Woodstock Scheduler, an optimization application for generating harvest crew schedules that are responsive to real-world changes.
Within forestry, understanding which systems to apply to harvest blocks while considering timing, mill demands, haul costs, crews and equipment needs is critical to reducing costs and increasing revenue. Woodstock Scheduler empowers operations to model the forest supply chain and balance all these factors to produce optimal, defensible harvest and delivery schedules.
Our clients rely on Woodstock Scheduler to assign the right crews and systems to the right harvest blocks at the right time to fulfill sales contracts, reduce costs and maximize revenue,” said Marie Eve Fillion, Director of Analytics Solutions. “New functionality in this release enhances visualization of scheduled activities and provides the ability to take crew movement costs into consideration when optimizing decisions.”
The primary function of Woodstock Scheduler is to generate a crew schedule that determines which units get assigned to each crew and at which time. Once a schedule has been built, users can view and modify harvest schedules, dynamically responding to factors such as unexpected shutdowns, changes to crew productivity rates and product demand.
Woodstock Scheduler automates the process of developing schedules to help understand wood flow and perform in-depth impact and risk analysis. Users can create and compare scenarios, and report on Key Performance Indicators, giving them the ability to articulate and defend plans with focused charts and reports.
Visualizing Scheduled Activities
Woodstock Scheduler’s Gantt Chart Schedule interface offers an intuitive way to view the schedule and can be arranged to display production metrics for multiple attributes in several levels of detail over the planning horizon. The schedule can be viewed and edited simultaneously with the associated spatial data in the Maps section, so you can see how your schedule plays out on the ground.
With the latest release, an Activity Gantt View has been added for viewing scheduled actions without relying on maps. This is particularly helpful for visualizing scheduled activities related to prescriptions and regimes, and for viewing activities that are scheduled after the harvest action. The Activity Gantt View also makes it possible to view delivery volumes associated with multi-period harvests.
Sequencing and Crew Movement
A new Crew Movement feature within Woodstock Scheduler enables forest management organizations to consider and reduce the cost it takes to move harvest and silvicultural crews from one block/sequence to another.
The Crew Movement feature leverages the Sequence functionality to include movement costs in the matrix, so that the solver can take crew movement costs into consideration when optimizing decisions.
Adding further flexibility to the Crew Movement functionality, the sequence generator tool can also be used to manually edit existing sequences, or to manually create new ones altogether.
The ability to model the supply chain to optimize, analyze and evaluate harvest schedules and decisions is vital within forestry. Optimizing resource allocation in Woodstock Scheduler can help to understand the impact of decisions on capacity, profitability, and risk, enabling adjustments that maximize revenue from harvest operation.
Learn more about Woodstock Scheduler features and benefits for harvest crew and delivery scheduling.
