Bluewater Business Solutions Ltd.

In any industry a company's success is determined through the development and execution of a carefully thought-out plan. Today's highly competitive forest industry is no exception.

The complex nature of the industry requires that intimate knowledge combined with an ability to produce accurate plans, schedules and associated cost estimates will provide your Company with a Blueprint for Success.

Forest companies require a system that assists them in making decisions with a high degree of confidence and accuracy, thus creating efficiencies and providing them with a competitive advantage.

ProjectAnalyst supports the harvesting plan by providing an economic assessment of the associated area while maintaining and considering mandated forest management objectives.  The system is designed to permit the user to define harvest units within a cutblock.

The system incorporates an in-depth mapping module, equipment & employee profiles, on-site environmental factors, and - most importantly - your Company's expert knowledge.

ProjectAnalyst supports:

• Ground Based
  • Bluewater's Skidding Route Algorithm considers the environment and available machines to determine the optimum skidding routes for a cutblock.
  • Routes generated consider maximum adverse slope, favourable slope, and maximum side-slope to ensure true operability.
  • The Skidding Route Algorithm determines whether a given area of the block should be hoe-chucked or forwarded as opposed to standard skidding.

• Cable Yarding
  • Bluewater's Cable Yarding Algorithm is applicable for grapple yarding, skyline yarding, or highlead yarding, all either uphill or downhill.
  • Each cable yarding team has defined production rates, tower and tail-hold heights, cable classes, and average setup times which are used to calculate productivity at any location.
  • The Cable Yarding Algorithm can support 100% log suspension.
  • The algorithm determines the optimum placement of cable yarding setups based on the block layout, topography and available teams.

• Heli Logging
  • Bluewater's Heli Logging Algorithm simply requires decking site locations.
  • Each heli logging team has defined travel speeds (loaded and unloaded), weight capacity and load - unload time/cycle which are used to calculate skidding costs.

ProjectAnalyst's estimation system supports every phase of forest harvesting.  In addition to generating a realistic work plan, ProjectAnalyst identifies:

• Inoperable areas
  
  • Roadside decking sites too steep for wood to be left on
  • Areas which are impossible to skid due to steep adverse/favourable/cross-sectional slope
  • Areas of the block which cannot be cable harvested due to lack of deflection
• Bottlenecks between phases where more teams should be used to maintain productivity
• Bottlenecks at individual decking sites creating long wait times for the log trucks
• Trees too large to fall, process, skid, load or haul
• Very long skidding distances due to environmental limitations

ProjectAnalyst's estimation system is ideally suited towards optimizing harvesting of cutblocks to ensure that the most economical plan is provided.  ProjectAnalyst can be used to determine the effect of:

• Road Placement
• Block Boundary Location
• Team Selection / Project Scheduling
• Harvesting Method

A comparison between harvesting plans