On August 10, 2026, American Forest Management's Lake States region stopped writing paper trip tickets. Every active job moved to Waldo that morning: 55 jobs, and more than 40 logging and trucking companies that had never used Waldo before.
AFM manages timberland for private and institutional owners across the U.S. The Lake States team, based in Houghton, Michigan, coordinates foresters, logging contractors, truckers, and mills across the region.
AFM did not run a pilot job first. They flipped the switch on the whole region at once. Six weeks later, AFM told us they no longer needed the weekly support meeting.
AFM Lake States runs dozens of active harvest jobs at once. Each one ties together a cutter, a skidder crew, trucking companies, and a mill. Every load produced a paper ticket, and every week contractors pulled those tickets together into settlement sheets and sent them to the AFM office.
The office then keyed that information into its accounting system, Forest Products Accounting (FPA). Jobs already lived in FPA, so setting them up again by hand in a new system would have doubled the work before a single e-ticket was written.
AFM needed a way to move the whole region without asking 40+ outside companies to learn a new system on their own, and without rebuilding 55 jobs by hand.
Most e-ticket rollouts are staggered. One job goes first, then a few crews, then the rest of the region over several months. That approach limits risk, but it also means the office runs two processes the whole time, and contractors on paper jobs never see the benefit.
AFM went the other way. On go-live day, every job, contractor, and trucker in the region moved to Waldo together.
The heavy lifting happened in the week before launch. Waldo's product team worked directly with AFM and FPA to make job creation work, and all 55 jobs landed the Friday before go-live. AFM's office staff said the import made setup "so much easier."
[AFM quote goes here. Ask Eric Stier or Larry for one or two sentences on what changed for the office or contractors.]
The rollout was not friction-free. Early on, a required skidder field blocked some crews from creating tickets, and AFM pushed hard on how reconciliation worked. Waldo fixed the first within days and rebuilt the second so each company controls its own reconciliation. Both changes now ship to every Waldo customer.
Most land managers assume moving off paper means a long pilot and a slow, region-by-region crawl. AFM Lake States showed a different path: do the setup work up front, move everyone on the same day, and put real people behind the launch.
The result is one process in the office from day one, instead of paper and digital running side by side for months. For contractors, it means every job works the same way, not just the pilot job.
If you are weighing a staggered rollout, ask what it costs to run two systems for a year. For AFM, the answer was to skip that year.
Book a Free Strategy Session and we’ll show how Waldo could digitize your ticket workflow.
