SCA’s forest machines ‘talk’ to each other
SCA has invested heavily in machines that can “talk” to one another in a bid to improve efficiency and reduce the carbon footprint of tree felling.
Machine-to-machine technology allows the company to optimise the economic yield of every tree felled while streamlining its forest operations.
SCA uses an Ericsson telecommunications network which, unlike traditional GSM networks, requires relatively few cell towers and allows large quantities of data to be transmitted between machines.
“We’ve streamlined the felling process by linking up hundreds of felling machines and trucks that exchange information through a mobile network in an unbroken digital chain,” says SCA Skog’s CIO Rolf Edström.
“The machine-to-machine link is mainly used today for planning and directing felling work and timber transportation, but going forward it can also be used for more long-term planning.”
SCA’s operations are carried out in sparsely populated forest districts in Sweden and a great deal of time can be lost if a driver makes a wrong turn or takes the wrong timber.
The machines communicate with each other regarding which trees require felling and to which mill the logs should be taken, saving precious time in an environment where a mistake can be costly.
The machine-to-machine (M2M) system was exhibited at the Mobile World Congress trade fair where SCA demonstrated the effectiveness of the network by communicating from Barcelona with a machine in a Swedish forest 3,500 miles away.
Not only was the machine able to perform set functions but SCA was also able to troubleshoot any problems from a distance.
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