Electronic sensors to individual trees...

Electronic sensors attached to individual trees will show which ones to cut down. In Canfor Corp.'s vision for the future of forestry, the age-old act of hewing wood looks more like science fiction, with workers relying on electronic censors attached to individual trees to tell them which one to cut down in order to make the exact two-by-fours that a specific customer wants.

Such censors are called "motes," circuit-based machines that can measure properties such as the growth rate and size of trees, light, soil conditions and other factors that influence growth, and transmit the information to a central computer.

With that kind of information, says John Tolkamp, Canfor's general manager for information technology, not only could foresters manage silviculture processes more efficiently, but company marketers could also know exactly how much lumber inventory the company has while it is still standing in the forest.

"We'll basically select the tree on demand," Tolkamp said in an interview. "I can see the day -- I don't know if it'll be in my lifetime -- but I can see a day when the customer [puts in his] order, and we harvest the tree within seconds. It's the Dell model of forestry. That will come."

And when it does, Tolkamp said they will be able to reduce the inventory it has to hold, and cut costs throughout the production system.

Tolkamp mused about such future possibilities during a panel discussion recorded in Vancouver Monday by the technology giant EDS to be delivered as a podcast during a worldwide EDS event in January.

The tree-harvesting process will be similar to the bar-code-driven computer tracking that courier companies use to tell customers where their parcels are.

Tolkamp added that Canfor customers can track their lumber orders in real time now, but the next generation of the technology will be more sophisticated than barcodes, allowing company managers to take the information stream to extremes.

He said there could be a day when builders will be able to give Canfor an electronic copy of their construction project's specifications, "and from that, we'll send them a house that's [pre-cut], or ready to configure."

"It will be a 'build-by-numbers' kind of thing."

Jeff Wacker, EDS's Texas-based futurist, said that while such processes are still many years off, it is not because the technology needs to be invented, it is because the costs have to be brought down to justify attaching such censors to individual trees, and businesses still have to catch up with understanding the business models needed to make such processes work.

Wacker said the predecessors to motes, RFID, or radio-frequency-identification, tags already exist and are being used.

For example, he said the Japanese beef industry already puts RFID tags on packages of kobe beef, which a customer can scan at a store to find out exactly which farm the animal it came from grew up on, what it was fed and whether or not it was inoculated or treated with antibiotics.

Wacker added that the world's financial industry already uses the sophisticated computer modelling that would be involved, which allows computers to make complex decisions in as little as two-billionths of a second (known as nanoseconds) -- the time it takes for a beam of light to travel about 45 centimetres.

"In some industries it's already there," Wacker said. "Some industries are already unit-tagging [products], and some industries are already seeing that integration of information where major decisions are made."

He added that that sort of information flow has not been developed in the forest industry, but repeated Tolkamp's assessment that "it's coming."

The technology is already being tested in forests, and Wacker said it might be justifiable to tag individual trees for more expensive hardwood species within 15 years.

Michael Walters, EDS's leader of its manufacturing and global industry practice, said that when it is put in place, the process could even help a company with things like proving its environmental stewardship practices to bodies that certify the sustainability of forest operations.

Wacker added that it could also give a company an advantage in maintaining the quality of its brand reputation.

"Once you get all that information flowing, and we will, because it's already starting, that will provide a lot of competitive advantage to the company that wants to take advantage of it," Wacker said.

He added that the direction Canfor is taking will put some power to create demand into the firm's own hands.

depenner@png.canwest.com © The Vancouver Sun 2005