The problem with quality data in most mills
If you walk the floor of most sawmills, you’ll find quality control happening in a variety of ways. A grader might jot defect notes on a paper checklist at the log yard, while a kiln operator logs moisture readings in a notebook and transfers them to a spreadsheet at the end of their shift. Meanwhile, a planer supervisor is calling out grade counts that live in someone’s memory or on a whiteboard that gets erased by morning.
Each of these checks matters, but none of them talk to each other. So, when final grade comes up short, there’s no way to trace it back to a debarking issue or a log yard grading call made three days earlier. The information is there, but it’s scattered across paper, spreadsheets, and tribal knowledge. Not to mention, it’s disconnected from the rest of the production line.
What is CEDAR?
CEDAR is our quality management platform that connects the full flow of lumber production. It pulls data from the log yard, sawmill, kiln, and planer into one cloud system. Instead of quality data living in silos, CEDAR ties it together so your mill can see how a decision at the log yard plays out by the time lumber reaches the planer.
CEDAR bundles the specific checks that your mill already runs, things like log quality audits, debarking audits, and planer drill tests, into one connected system.
Purpose-built for sawmills
We designed CEDAR to capture quality data when it happens, not reconstruct it afterward. Its interfaces are tablet-first, built to work with gloved hands in dusty, loud mill environments. Our guided quality forms walk operators through tests with integrated photo capture, defect tagging, and measurement tools baked right into the workflow. This means that a grader or kiln operator can log a check in seconds, right where the work is happening, instead of scribbling it down to type up later.
What’s inside
Once data starts flowing from every station, CEDAR turns it into real-time dashboards that track quality trends from raw log all the way to finished grade. Reporting rolls up to any leadership level. This way, a plant manager and a corporate quality lead can look at the same data through different lenses.
More importantly, every test, audit, and grade check becomes trackable improvement data instead of a paper record that’s filed and forgotten. CEDAR’s automated corrective action workflows assign ownership and hold people accountable when something drifts. This means issues are caught and resolved faster, improving grade recovery and cutting down on rework before it compounds.
How CEDAR fits with ASPEN and BIRCH
As the the newest member of the MADERA family, CEDAR joins ASPEN and BIRCH as part of a connected operational intelligence suite. Where ASPEN tracks downtime and BIRCH handles root cause analysis, CEDAR fills the quality gap. It captures the grading, audit, and process data that explains why output looks the way it does. Together, the three platforms paint a fuller picture of your mill’s performance. Now you’ll know what stopped, why it stopped, and what it cost in quality.
Ready to see it on your floor?
If quality data at your mill is still scattered across clipboards, spreadsheets, and institutional memory, CEDAR can change that. Book a demo with us and see what it looks like when log yard grading, kiln performance, and final planer grade finally connect.
