SawmillSmart — Digital Production Platform
A custom digital production optimisation platform built from scratch for a large industrial timber processing company. The product is fully deployed in daily operations and serves a manufacturing business with annual revenue exceeding €42M.
The Product Challenge
Raw material quality at a timber mill fluctuates daily — each log batch has a different yield potential depending on diameter, species, and quality grade. Manual planning meant leaving 6+ percentage points of yield on the table every shift, with no mechanism to recover it.
The core challenge was not just algorithmic — it was a product problem. Planners had to trust a system built around their existing mental model, not replace their expertise with a black box. The product had to augment human decision-making, not substitute it.
I ran Design Thinking sessions with production planners and operations managers to surface the actual friction: unclear trade-offs, no scenario comparison, no connection between commercial orders and production planning.
