How to Help Your Wood Mill Embrace the Cloud
As a forestry procurement professional, you know that relying on paper load and scale tickets has needless costs and downsides. You’d like your wood mill to realize greater profits and efficiency by implementing a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution for digital operations— specifically, a cloud-based log and fiber procurement and settlement platform. But you fear your managers or the mill owners will be reluctant to sign on.
How can you effectively persuade them and champion your cause? This article presents a few best practices.
Determine Your Wood Mill’s Process for Software Purchases
A sound first step in championing the cause of digital transformation at your wood mill is determining who normally makes significant purchase decisions. Are multiple departments or staff members involved? Whose buy-in is needed at each stage?
Knowing how your mill goes about making significant purchase decisions and upgrades will inform all of your subsequent advocacy choices.
Build the Business Case
You have a vision of how cloud-based operations will transform and improve mill operations. But others may be fearful of change or not understand the value of digital load ticket tracking. To help them understand your viewpoint, you’ll need to educate them on the benefits your mill would achieve as well as address their concerns.
To build your case, you can rely on our e-book “How Wood Mills Can Increase Profitability Through Digital Transformation.” This e-book details all the advantages you gain by switching to digital operations and elaborates on why the change is painless, with Legna guiding you every step of the way.
Gather Allies
To avoid being perceived as a lone, wild-eyed dreamer, first gather allies who also support digital innovation. That way, you can show that other valued team members at your wood mill share your view of the benefits of a cloud-based procurement and settlement platform.
You’re likely to find allies on the accounting and information technology teams because these staff members would also benefit from cloud-based operations software for wood mills. Information technology staff would gain data security and automatic updates, while accounting would welcome how the Angel platform automatically reconciles load and scale e-tickets and calculates all settlement amounts as soon as a truckload is weighed in.
Talk to staff in these areas, sharing how the software will make their jobs easier.
Schedule a Demo
Before pitching your wood mill’s decision-makers, you should also schedule a demo of the software solution you’re considering to see firsthand how the platform performs. Test-driving the solution will make you a more informed advocate, able to answer questions on how the software actually works.
Pitch to Decision-Makers
Together with the allies you’ve gathered, make your pitch to the decision-makers, presenting the business case for switching from a paper, manual process to digital operations.
Should the decision-makers have any lingering doubts after your pitch, offer to schedule a demo of the software for them.
Don’t be discouraged if they say “no” to demoing or purchasing the software. Ask follow-up questions about why they don’t want to move forward. Their answers will reveal any concerns you can address.
People often say “no” to a purchase several times before saying “yes.”
Ask for Help
As you follow these best practices, please reach out to Legna for any questions or concerns about our Angel platform and how you can convince others of its value. We’re ready to assist you from the sidelines as you work to modernize your wood mill operations—and attain the many benefits of digital transformation.