Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

Biofuels are getting more important as EU plans to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy sources. Because of that Sveaskog has chosen to invest in developing the handling process of logging residue. The company has a joined organisation for handling both round wood and logging residue. They are also working at integrating the forwarding of the logging residue with the rest of the harvesting team. Sveaskog is currently extracting 44 % of the available amount of logging residue. Their goal is to extract 60 %.

The objective of this study was to learn how five main topics affected the extraction of logging residue. The main topics where:

- Working methods
- Communication and feedback
- Issues concerning education
- Attitude and motivation
- What was considered to be the main problems of increasing the extraction of logging residue in the organisation.

The study was carried out as a number of qualitative interviews with people that worked with planning and production of logging residue in Sveaskog. The selection of respondents for the study was made from all five of Sveaskogs sale areas in order to get a broad perspective on the matter.

The results indicated that most respondents knew which tasks that belonged to their position. The respondents all agreed that the forest machine operators was the ones that had been most affected when Sveaskog started to extract logging residue. There where communication obstacles that prevented the person that worked with forwarding logging residue to give feedback to the harvesting team. The forest machine operators knew too little about why Sveaskog had chosen to work with logging residue to see any meaning in the task. The motivation to work with logging residue was low, especially among the harvesting teams that wasn’t entrepreneurs but employed at Sveaskog.

To deal with the problems Sveaskog should:

- Improve communication by giving out contact information and supporting the group feeling between the harvesting team and the forwarding of logging residue.
- Increase the understanding for why logging residue is an important product to motivate working with the assortment.
- Create a reward system so that the harvesting team can count logging residue as an asset. The reward system should work as an incentive to develop the teams working methods.