Manufacturing Information Systems for Forestry Companies Based on Integrated Modular Approach «Many Companies—One Tool»

Abstract

The paper describes a modular methodology for the design of manufacturing information systems (MIS) on the example of forestry industry. The need to develop such methodology is justified by the current demand of forestry companies to increase the return on investment in information systems implementation. The proposed modular design methodology makes it possible to design and implement MIS that takes into account the specifics of a forestry enterprise and is less expensive compared to competing solutions. The advantage becomes possible due to the use of an integrated modular approach to a wide range of forestry companies "many companies-one tool" based on universal integrated platform solutions. This approach uses a matrix relation of a specific forestry enterprise with a universal technological process. The novelty of the proposed methodology is the automation of developing the mathematical model of a forestry enterprise by choosing unified procedures from the available set and tuning the parameters to account for the specifics of a particular enterprise. This allows using a unified set of functional diagrams, which reduces the time and cost of designing and modifying MIS based on them. The consistent approach to selecting the unified procedures leads to obtaining the mathematical model of a forestry enterprise, which becomes the core of its MIS. Application of this methodology makes it possible to design, implement and scale MIS for forestry companies faster and cheaper than using traditional approaches.

Exploring the Role of ICTs and Communication Flows in the Forest Sector

“…Digital technologies have significant potential in forestry [25] and compose a major asset and transform the forest industry by providing unprecedented solutions that make forests smarter [26]. The need to implement ICTs must become a tool that serves forest users, wood buyers, operators of logging machines, or forest planners [27,28]. In addition, the implementation of ICTs and their innovations have facilitated the tasks of data collection, as well as its processing (greater accuracy and efficiency) [29].…”