Sustainable Forestry Made Easy Using Lowcode

• Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management
• Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Application Development Platforms
• Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Connectivity Platforms

• Field Services
• Logistics & Transportation
• Quality Assurance

• Fleet Management
• Predictive Maintenance
• Real-Time Location System (RTLS)
• Remote Asset Management
• Track & Trace of Assets

• Software Design & Engineering Services
• System Integration

The Republic of Liberia in Africa has a serious history of illegal logging, which remains a significant issue. To mitigate this, the United Nations developed a barcode system to track logs through the supply chain. NRD S.A. was chosen by the EU to help Liberian authorities curb illegal logging. They needed a system to streamline legal logging operations, including verification and licensing of authorized logs for export. NRD invested in 440,000 hectares of forest area in Brazil and Liberia to initiate sustainable forest management. Data collection was crucial, with each tree earmarked using barcodes generated from parameters like GPS location, dimensions, and log time. The forestry department maintained a central database stored on the cloud. Trees were chosen for logging based on quality and carbon dioxide neutrality, making the process traceable and transparent.

NRD (Natural Resources Development S.A.) is a company based in Liechtenstein that specializes in sustainable forest management, operating primarily in the African sub-continent. The company relies heavily on data to manage its operations and sought to digitize all its sustainable forest management processes. To achieve this, NRD partnered with Vanenburg, an independent IT services company based in the Netherlands. Vanenburg is a WaveMaker certified premier partner of the European Union (EU) and works in the mobile applications and cloud services domain for both large and small enterprises. NRD's goal was to streamline their legal logging operations and manage processes like verification and licensing of authorized logs being exported globally.

Vanenburg's main challenge was to design a solution that could digitize all of NRD’s processes, including tracking forest operations, financial processes, logistics, and fleet management. The platform needed to be mobile-first to allow field workers in remote Liberian forests to tag each tree and record data offline on their mobile devices. This data would later be uploaded to a cloud-based portal. Vanenburg used the WaveMaker low-code platform to build a modern application quickly and at scale. WaveMaker outperformed other vendors in terms of scalability, onboarding time, and offline capability. The application used HTML5-based UI themes and widgets, resulting in a user-friendly interface. The app captured data like GPS location, log time, and dimensions, storing it in offline tables built into the app. The offline functionality was crucial as field workers operated in remote areas without internet connectivity. The platform allowed for offline data capture, which was later uploaded to a cloud-based platform. The syncing process was designed to operate with minimal overheads, enabling large data transfers even over weak network signals.

• Vanenburg used WaveMaker’s open standards-based low-code platform to build a mobile application for NRD, leveraging component-based microservices architecture.
• The application created using WaveMaker was linked to various mobile phone functions, capturing data like GPS location and log time.
• The offline functionality allowed field workers to capture data in remote areas without internet connectivity, storing it locally and uploading it later.

• NRD invested in 440,000 hectares of forest area in Brazil and Liberia for sustainable forest management.