Speaker
Description
Production planning in a Nordic context involves scheduling volumes purchased from private woodlot owners for harvest by independent cut-to-length (CTL) contractors. Planning goals include operational targets for production volume fulfillment, relocation efficiency, and ground damage. The FORAC Harvest Arena provides an online training environment where managers and students can work towards higher goal fulfillment during independent training sessions of varying difficulty.
Each training scenario involves managing 6 CTL teams (harvester, forwarder) towards fulfillment of monthly production goals for 5-7 mill customers over 3 months. 1100 harvesting contracts are located across 3 climate zones where each zone has individual patterns for weekly operating conditions (4 weather classes). The user map interface uses click-and-drag functionality to route harvesting teams between harvesting sites. A 6-factor filter function determines which sites are displayed on the map interface.
The arena offer varying scenarios where the key functionality includes a weekly prognosis for trafficability versus the actual operating conditions met by the manager when the next week arrives. Monthly mill customer demand can be varied in terms for volume and log size. The training typically starts with an informal test-run during stable conditions (mid-summer or mid-winter). It then proceeds to more challenging conditions such as freeze/thaw transitions between ii) autumn-winter and iii) winter-spring-summer.
So far Harvest arena has been used in professional and university training. The primary challenge is high fulfillment of monthly mill production goals (+/- 10 % goal volume per mill customer). In general there has been greater within-group variation for professional training. Even though scenario difficulty increases as training progresses both cohorts increased their production goal fulfillement. Average production scores for professional training increased from 59 to 66 % between autumn- and spring conditions. For university training the scores increased from 77 % for stable conditions to 82% and 87% for autumn- and spring conditions.
Reflections on learning progression: The available selection of harvesting contracts for a single CTL team decreases as demands for site bearing capacity increase and relocation distances decrease. For cohorts with lower levels of production fulfillment, KPIs for both ground damage and relocation efficiency improved with training. However for the final and most challenging scenario (spring) both professional and student groups had similar KPI-levels for ground damage and relocation distances.
Pedagogical approach: Completion of each 12-week training scenario requires 3-4 hours. Each scenario is followed by a post-exercise presentation of results with discussion of i) basic principles and ii) further improvement potential. The follow-up sessions have proved to be particulary valuable opportunity for sharing of practical insights and analytical approaches.
| Keywords | training, management, trafficability, on-line |
|---|
