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Digital technology might not be the first thing you think of when thinking about the logging and timber industry, but one Savannah entrepreneur hopes to changes that.

“We’re hoping to be a disrupter of the business,” said Dean McCraw of Phloem, a mobile app for the forest products industry, which shows the origin point of timber, provides mill wait times, allows loads of timber to be tracked and allows users to report any major issues they encounter at mills.

“Right now, we’ve been doing it the same way for so many years and we see a lot of opportunity to bring real time data to the forest products industry and I think it’ll bring about some changes.” McCraw said often drivers who are dropping off timber to mills aren’t aware of problems or long wait times and some of the current methods of communication are a bit outdated. “There are still folks using CB radios, we thought that went away in the 1970s, but there’s still some form of communication attempting to overcome this problem,” he said.

“Phloem starts out as a community app that all these truck drivers can use so that we know what’s happening at the mills in real time and they can avoid problem areas, because each mill is going to have problems. Maybe too many trucks show up at one time, maybe equipment problems, but now the guys will know what’s going on in real time so they can avoid it.”

McCraw also hopes to help combat timber theft with the app, which he said typically occurs one of two ways; double weighing, where a driver will sit in the truck while it’s being weighed at the mill and then exit the truck and weigh the load again, which results in the mill paying twice for the same load of timber or drivers will lie about the origin of the timber.

Read more on this from the Savannah Morning News at https://www.savannahnow.com/news/20180604/phloem-aims-to-streamline-communication-combat-theft-in-forest-product-industry.

For more information on the Phloem app visit https://www.phloem-app.com/.