Unfortunately, the market never demands our products in the same proportion as our supply. Yet as producers, we must do something with the low-grade material in order to use the high-grade wood. As public pressure has limited timber supplies, putting these precious resources to their highest and best use has become imperative. Most of our experienced managers, have developed a level of understanding, and therefore an intuitive method of dealing with changing supply and market conditions. Yet with so much complexity, and so many alternatives, it's difficult, if not impossible to know how best to process a supply of timber. We develop optimization systems that capture mill management knowledge, organizes the complexity, and solves for the most profitable combination of material and processing resources.

Mill configuration is a common challenge faced by our large timber and wood companies with multiple facilities. Over the years, we've built processing mills around local wood supplies. In some cases, these supplies have either dwindled or no longer exist. Market changes are also affecting lumber and plywood mills that now must compete with LVL and OSB and paper products. The result unfortunately, has led to mill closures. Evaluating and reaching such hard decisions should only be done in the context of the entire company's mill configuration. The value of each mill is best determined by understanding how its capabilities fit within the entire company. For example it may be necessary to change a mill's product mix or practice a different transportation pattern, in order for it to remain effective. We develop systems that use the optimization approach to find the best mill configuration.

The new materials and technologies that are being introduced into our industry necessitate a constant re-evaluation of the economics. The industry has begun to redefine itself as the "fiber products" instead because the combined use of synthetics with wood has become more common. Technologies that can upgrade chips into competitively engineered products are changing our economic assumptions of the entire supply chain.  Importation of hardwood species are being considered for their strength characteristics in supplying materials to the production of LVL.  Optimization has proven to be an ideal approach to finding "least-cost" formulations and recipes. We develop systems that easily evaluate the benefits of using new technologies and materials.