Company: Landowner / Land Manager – Lyme Great Lakes Timberlands

Overview: Lyme Great Lakes Timberlands owns over 600,000 acres in Michigan and Wisconsin.  They are a portfolio company of Lyme Timber who owns about 1.5 million acres in the US. With a mission rooted in long-term stewardship and conservation, their team needed a way to modernize field operations without disrupting established workflows.

‍The Challenge: Managing dozens of logging contractors, haulers, and mills across the Great Lakes region meant dealing with massive volumes of trip tickets, complex FSC/SFI compliance, and fragmented systems like LIMS. Paper tickets delayed payments, reconciliation was tedious, and scale disputes created constant friction. Field-level information often failed to reach the people who needed it most — from foresters to skidder operators.
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The Solution: Through the Hanford Project, Lyme partnered with Waldo to implement a full-scale digital transformation. All jobs, tickets, and contracts were digitized in Waldo, and the system was mapped directly to LIMS using aligned contract numbers, haul contracts, and service IDs. FSC and SFI certificates were automatically attached to trip tickets. The Waldo team worked closely with Lyme's administrative leads Dawn Ganzel and Cheri Yeshe, and with boots-on-the-ground insight from Bill O’Brion, field functionality and user adoption improved week after week.
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Key Features Implemented:

• Custom FSC/SFI mapping and certificate tracking
• Real-time editable sort sheets for changing mill specs
• LIMS integration (Contract # = Source #, Service ID mapping, Haul Contract sync)
• Digital onboarding for all haulers and logging crews
• Mobile app improvements for job filtering, ticket search, and print formatting

The Results:

• Complete elimination of paper tickets across Great Lakes operations
• Improved speed and accuracy of scale reconciliation
• Transparent, real-time access to all loads for landowners and mills
• Smoothest large-scale digital rollout to date

What Made the Difference: Working with Bill O’Brion and the Lyme team made all the difference. Bill not only brought sharp operational insight but also brought everyone together — loggers, haulers, foresters, and admins — to build something that worked in the real world. Dawn and Cheri provided relentless feedback that shaped Waldo 2.0 into a tool that genuinely serves complex landowner needs. Luke, Lyme's GIS and IT lead, played a crucial role in onboarding and final legacy data cleanup

"Waldo didn’t just meet us where we were — they mapped their system to ours so nothing got lost in translation. It’s not just software. It’s a partner."

— Dawn Ganzel, Administrative Lead, Lyme Great Lakes Timberlands

The Hanford Project proved that when technology, teamwork, and timber come together, good things happen. Waldo is proud to support Lyme Timber in their mission to manage working forests with care, integrity, and efficiency.

Lyme Timber has since expanded the use of Waldo to other portfolio companies.