In order to supply its steel mills, Brazilian steel producer Gerdau works with renewable eucalyptus plantations, destined to the charcoal production. And to manage these forest assets, Gerdau bets on the use of the Inflor Forest, the industry’s leading system in Latin America.
In operation since July 2018, the Inflor Forest system has already achieved good results, contributing to the improvement of the management of the charcoal production chain on the Gerdau farms. The following modules were implemented: Forestry Register, GIS, Silviculture, Harvesting, Logistics, Charcoal, Sales, Costs and integrations with the ERP SAP solution.
According to Jehan Albuquerque, Inflor’s Solutions Manager, the optimization of work is a differential for Gerdau. “The main advantage is the reduction of time and the elimination of manual labor for monthly consolidation of the supply and production information of the 3,000 carbonization furnaces, divided into 31 plants spread throughout Minas Gerais. The system allows the information management of the 150 daily trips of the timber from the field to the carbonization plants to supply the more than 200 daily carbonization cycles in real time,” says Mr. Albuquerque.
Rodrigo Nascimento de Paula, Charcoal Production Manager at Gerdau, points out that the Inflor Forest facilitated the information flow. “We used to spend a lot of time organizing and consolidating data. With the new tool, we have reduced the time with these activities by at least 20%, thus we have been able to dedicate ourselves more to the effective analysis of the information that supports the decision making”, he adds.
