Every serious forestry machine should generate commercial data. Without it, costing is guesswork and contract negotiation is unarmed.
Use it: Daily, for every machine in the fleet.
Every serious forestry machine generates commercial data, and most of it goes unrecorded. That is why so many contractors cannot say what a machine actually costs them per unit produced.
Without these records the next machine purchase is a guess, the next contract negotiation is unarmed, and underperforming assets stay hidden inside a fleet average.
The discipline is not administrative. Recording delay hours separately from engine hours is what reveals that a machine is waiting on trucks rather than underperforming — and those two problems have entirely different solutions.
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Record daily
Then calculate — harvesting
Then calculate — mulching
Then calculate — chipping
Interpreting the answers
What a good answer looks like
Ticking a box is not the same as being satisfied with the answer. These are the lines where the response itself tells you something.
What you asked
A good answer
A answer that should worry you
Productive hours versus engine hours
Both recorded separately, daily.
Only engine hours. Machines routinely record 15-30 per cent more engine hours than productive hours, which understates cost per unit by the same margin.
Lumped together, which hides whether the problem is your machine or someone else's.
Consumables by machine
Tracked per unit produced — teeth per hectare, chain per cubic metre, knives per tonne.
Tracked as a monthly total, which cannot be compared between sites or machines.
Working through it
How to use this checklist
Record daily, per machine — weekly aggregation loses the detail that makes the data useful
Attribute delay hours to a cause, because the cause determines the fix
Convert to per-unit measures monthly, not annually
Use the numbers to coach operators rather than to police them, or the recording will quietly stop
Common questions
Frequently asked questions
Isn't machine telematics enough?
Telematics gives you engine hours, fuel, location and fault codes, which is a good start and not the whole picture. It generally cannot tell you why a machine was idle, what it produced, or what the consumables cost. The combination — telematics for the machine, daily records for the context — is what produces usable cost per unit.
What is the single most valuable number to start recording?
Productive hours, separated from engine hours. Almost every cost-per-unit calculation depends on it, and almost nobody records it. Once you have it, depreciation per hour, cost per cubic metre and true machine availability all become calculable rather than estimated.
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