The makers and leaders of Forest Management systems: INFLOR

Changing bio-asset management all over the world

INFLOR started in 2001 in Brazil, with a solution for Eucalyptus fiber production for the paper industry. The company has developed solutions that help users maximize performance in managing forests and agricultural assets to leverage their earnings from the conscious use of natural resources and respecting the environment and society.

The comprehensive solution helps the clients by providing procedures for increasing productivity, monitoring environmental conditions, producing seedlings, growing forests and developing its roads, controlling diseases, managing machinery and teams, and profiting the whole chain. This has helped Inflor expand its footprint from Brazil to Europe, Asia, Africa, and the U.S.

Currently our solutions are used to manage about 29 million acres around the world, supporting pulp companies, wood panel companies, wood producers and TIMOs in maximizing performance in forestry asset management.

Front and center with the Director of INFLOR, Antonio Tatagiba

Can you talk about your first Project and was it successful?

Our first client in Brazil was a huge Brazilian pulp producer headquartered in the municipality of Aracruz, in Espírito Santo. This company is innovative in several fields, creating the most important Technology Center in the sector and in the country, starting with the important forest research that resulted in the productivity improvement from 15m3 per hectare per year to around 50m3 per hectare per year. Furthermore, the company was instrumental in introducing eucalyptus as the desired fiber worldwide through the preparation of top professionals, processes, tools, and systems to support this challenging industry chain.

In this project, our first product version was conceived, attending all the forest processes and the forest chain from the land acquisition to the wood delivering to the pulp mill, including spatial functions, forest operations management, costs control, biodiversity monitoring, forest inventory, wood quality checking and others.

Our first client based in the U.S. was a forest management company with offices throughout the country. The operations in the Southeast and the Pacific coast differ due to differences in species, products, ways of control, and more. They were using multiple solutions to manage all these operations, and therefore, it was hard to aggregate all the information to compare costs and productivity and also to manage all the information in a single database. So they contacted us, and we provided a single database for them to manage their operations with our flexible solution. We use different parameterizations for each business model that they have, and then we aggregate all this information into our platform. This has helped them manage all their operations in different offices using a single tool from our platform.

We are presently making adjustments to incorporate the needs of the U.S. market since it is different from other countries, and our flexible approach has helped us in this regard.

“Earning trust and respect of consumers all around the world is through consistent focus on delivering high quality in all of our actions,” how do you interpret this statement?

With our in-depth experience of the industry, we bring to our customers the best practices in forest management. Using our solution, our customers can reduce their operational costs, up to 15 percent on their yearly budgets through more efficient planning and management. For each step of forest management, we have specific processes and tools to help clients in improving their productivity and reducing the costs. It is also important to consider that with our solution, our clients can more accurately evaluate their forest strategy and management, reducing possible social impacts and ensuring the generation of sustainable forests.

Describe your idea about innovation. How often do you innovate? Is it only when there is a need in the market?

We created a culture of constant innovation at INFLOR. We have an entire area fully focused on research and development, constantly evaluating new technologies and tools that can be applied to our solution and the reality of our customers.

Undoubtedly the human capital of our company is the greatest asset we have. We seek to encourage everyone to live in a day-to-day environment of co-creation. We are constantly researching, learning and adjusting our environment to create the best conditions to have a constant engagement of our team.

Customer service varies, but companies can still be successful. How do you maintain your customers’ trust and loyalty?

The values that unite us are Commitment, Competence, Collaboration, Focus on Results, Quality, Integrity, and Innovation. These values are rooted in our souls and certainly, make our relationships with our customers as well as strategic partnerships to evolve their business and much more than the provision of software products or services.

Do you have any new products ready to be launched?

Yes. We are currently working on the next generation of our forest management product, the INFLOR Forest, which will bring our customers new possibilities, like IoT, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and big data analytics are in rage now. We will also be launching new solutions in the coming months to support medium and short term planning of forest operations such as silviculture and harvesting, all supported by optimizers.

What is the future roadmap for the company?

We have plans to expand our operation and presence, especially in the U.S. market. We are coming up with a new version of our product that will have more mobile features so that users get constant functionality even when they are doing operations in the field. We have also come up with AI and machine learning features to serve our customers better.

Greet the chief

Antonio Carlos Arpini Tatagiba, International Services, and Products Director:

Antonio joined the company in 2010. He is a professional with over 18 years of experience in software development projects, on which the last 15 years as teams and projects leader/manager. During his professional career, he had the opportunity to work with different industries as Telecommunications, Steel Mill, Public Sector (Municipalities, State Governments, Military Service, and others), Food Industry, Pharmaceuticals, Retail, Life / Health Insurance, and Forest-Based Companies.

In INFLOR, Antonio has been involved in forest management solution implementation projects at the world's largest pulp, wood producers and forest assets management in Latin America, United States, Europe, and Asia.

“With a history of more than 18 years of experience, our solutions support people in maximizing performance in forestry and agricultural assets, allowing companies and producers improve its profits through the conscious use of natural resources and socioenvironmental respect.”