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LVM Uses a Latest Generation Solution for Planning Deliveries of Wood Products

Since July of this year, JSC “Latvia's State Forests” (LVM) has been using the latest generation of information technology solutions for logistics optimization to plan its daily deliveries of complex wood products. The implemented innovation allows for optimized scheduling of 700-800 cargo deliveries every day, based on data on available stocks, resources, customer contract obligations, road availability and business-related conditions.

LVM is one of the most important suppliers of roundwood in the country. In 2022, the company sold 6.39 million m3 of roundwood production. By just-in-time deliveries of customised assortments LVM helps create a predictable business environment, thus strengthening the competitiveness of its cooperation partners.

Planning and organizing the deliveries of wood products from the warehouses located in the forest by the road to the buyer's production plant is a complex process: every day you must plan how to efficiently organize deliveries to more than 200 locations from several thousand warehouses throughout the territory of Latvia, using different access roadways. Moreover, both the carrying capacity of each section of the roadway and the forecast weather conditions at the time of delivery should be taken into account during the planning process. Therefore, since the beginning of the company's operation, LVM has been looking for the most effective solutions to optimize the complex wood supply planning process by using state-of-the-art technological solutions.

“Today's business environment is rapidly changing, so we had to look for a completely new optimization solution for wood product supply planning. As a result of the innovation partnership procurement procedure, SIA “Mappost” was chosen as the supplier of the logistics solution. It is a company that solves highly complex route and resource optimization problems on a daily basis, including various changing real-life constraints and providing customers with full process control and transparency.

With the new solution, we can perform automated transportation tasks and route planning, significantly saving the company's resources and reducing the cost of wood product delivery, while leaving the least possible impact on the environment. The new solution contributes to the reduction of CO2 emissions, which occur in the process of transporting wood products,” says Mārtiņš Krūze, Executive Director of Supply of LVM Production and Delivery of Wood Products.

Although the logistics solver is a separate development project, it is also included as one of the modules in the LVM GEO platform, supplementing and improving its functionality and providing additional added value and support for the logistics and delivery process.

As a result of the innovation partnership procurement procedure, SIA “Mappost” was chosen as the supplier of the logistics solver, and in 2019 LVM and this company concluded the first innovation partnership agreement in Latvia for the development of a logistics optimization solver prototype.

“Thanks to LVM's high standards, the project became an example of ESG, as environmental, social and good governance factors were taken into account. The created optimization solution for the needs of LVM is unique in that neither in the European forest management nor elsewhere in the world is there an equivalent solution that would ensure the optimization of the specific conditions and data sets of the forest sector logistics. There are countless routing solutions for planning standard cargo deliveries and transport routing, but the planning of wood product deliveries has specific nuances, due to which the logistics IS solutions of other industries cannot be used in the forest sector,” says Mārtiņš Vimba, Member of the Board of SIA “Mappost”.

Forestry is a sector of the national economy, one of the tasks of which is to ensure the management of forest lands in a balanced way and volume, to ensure the production and supply of wood products to processing companies, as well as the diverse forest ecosystem products and services important to society today and for future generations. One of the stages of achieving the goals is the delivery of the wood products produced in the forest to the consumer or processing industrial establishments.