Stora Enso China starts automation project for sales and timber transport

In its plant in Guangxi - China, Stora Enso began to seek innovations that could simplify and give real-time visibility of its entire chain of sale and wood flow. The company manages daily dozens of customers receiving different products and hundreds of trucks with different sampling regulations, weighing and licensing by region.

Inflor's Transport and Sales module was the adopted solution because it allows in real-time an end-to-end visibility of the entire process by automating the steps of: Transport issue of sales order, loading, weighing receipt, sampling and volume adjustment. Through the use of tablets, users located in the countryside or at the road scales, and customers, may query existing sales orders and report relevant information for each step of the process, such as the type of truck used, vendors responsible for loading and unloading, task execution time, weighing and information regarding the sampling procedure for volume conversion.

All these information is stored in RFID devices that accompany the truck at all stages of the process, allowing the information to flow even in areas without GPRS signal or Wi-Fi. The solution is supported by a middleware that optimizes the integration of sales order information, transactions and inventory movement execution with SAP® system (SAP is a trademark or registered trademark of SAP AG in Germany and in several other countries).

Marcos Outeiro, INFLOR's Solutions Manager comments that "the implementation of this project increases substantially the level of planning and control of timber transport, enabling stock movements monitoring in real time, faster and more efficient decision-making process and response to possible unforeseen issues".

"This project makes transport process efficient and transparent, it also secures traceability of key information. Using of RFID cards and tablets keeps dynamic and accurate tracking to deliveries and minimize manual workload. Interfaces with our mill system enables automatic data transfer and ensure the security control. Successful deliveries of this project gives us confidence to start mill supply. Meanwhile it is also an opportunity for us to optimize our internal process." explains Amanda Ding, Head of Operational System Support, Stora Enso Guangxi Forestry.

Stora Enso's operations in Guangxi consist of a consumer board mill in the municipality of Beihai and tree plantations. The total planned investment of Stora Enso Guangxi is EUR 1600 million, to make it the largest Nordic direct investment in China, one of the largest foreign investments in the Guangxi region, and a significant investment in the strategy transformation of Stora Enso. The first phase of Beihai Mill has an annual capacity of 450,000 tonnes with an investment of EUR 800 million, and it has been official started up on 26 May 2016.