IT for sawmills and
wood products plants.
This page is about the mill itself: the fixed site where logs become lumber, pellets, panels, or posts. A mill is really two computer environments in one building. There's the office side, with email, accounting, and payroll. And there's the production side, with scanners, optimizers, PLCs, and scale systems, where a bad change can stop a shift. North Star is based in Prince George and we build and run ERP and production systems for wood products operations in northern BC, so we've been on both sides of that wall. If your question is about the harvesting side, camps, cutblocks, and GIS, see our forestry page instead.
The real IT problems inside a mill.
These are the issues that come up when we walk a wood products site. Most mills have at least four of them.
One flat network carrying everything.
In a lot of mills, the office PCs, the optimizer, the scale system, and the PLC network all sit on the same flat network because it grew that way over twenty years. That means a phishing email opened in the front office can reach the machines that run production. Segmentation, separate network zones with controlled crossings between office and floor, is the single highest-value security change most mills can make. It has to be done carefully, because production management software still needs data from the floor.
The mill keeps cutting while the office system is down.
The expensive outage at a mill often isn't the saw line stopping. It's the sales, tally, or shipping system going down while production keeps running. Lumber piles up with no tags, trucks queue at the scale, inventory counts drift from reality, and someone spends the next week reconciling paper notes against the ERP. Downtime planning for a mill has to cover the business systems, not just the floor.
The ERP is the mill's memory, and it's often unprotected.
Orders, tallies, grades, scale tickets, production schedules, customer pricing. If the ERP server dies and the last good backup is three weeks old or has never been test-restored, that's not an IT problem, it's a business continuity problem. Backup means little without a known, tested restore time.
Dust, vibration, and temperature kill office-grade gear.
Sawdust packs into fans and heatsinks. Vibration near the planer works connectors loose. Unheated buildings swing from -30 in January to +35 in July. Consumer desktops and access points on the production floor fail early and unpredictably. Floor environments need fanless or filtered hardware, industrial mounting, and a replacement plan that assumes attrition.
Equipment vendors with standing remote access.
Optimizer, scanner, and controls vendors legitimately need to dial in to their equipment. The common setup is an always-on remote access tool on a machine nobody patches, with a shared password the vendor set years ago. Every one of those is an unlocked door into production. The access needs to stay, but it needs to be scoped, time-limited, and logged.
Mills sit where the timber is, not where the fibre is.
Plenty of BC mills are past the end of town fibre. That used to mean living with a weak DSL line. Now the realistic mix is Starlink Business, fixed wireless where line of sight exists, and LTE failover, sized for what a mill actually pushes: ERP sync, vendor remote sessions, cameras, and phones.
Manufacturers are a preferred ransomware target.
Attackers target manufacturers because downtime pressure makes victims more likely to pay quickly, and because flat networks let one infected office machine reach production. For a mill the ask is blunt: pay, or ship nothing. The defence is layered and boring: segmentation, endpoint detection, offline backups, and tested restores. Boring is what works.
What North Star delivers for mills.
We're not learning this sector on your dime. We build and operate production and inventory systems for wood products operations in northern BC, and mills share most of their problems with other manufacturers. Here's what that looks like as a service.
OT/IT network segmentation done in phases.
We map what actually talks to what, then split office and production into separate zones with firewall-controlled crossings. Changes are staged into maintenance windows and coordinated with your millwrights and equipment vendors. Production data still flows to the office; office malware doesn't flow to production.
Managed Network →ERP and production system support.
We support, back up, and integrate the ERP you have, or build what you're missing. Scale tickets, tallies, production scheduling, and shipping all connected to one source of truth instead of five spreadsheets. Because we develop these systems ourselves, we can fix root causes instead of logging tickets with a vendor.
Custom Software →Backup and recovery built around restore time.
Image-based backup of the ERP and production servers with verified restores, an offline copy ransomware can't reach, and a written recovery-time target you've agreed to. We rehearse the restore so the first full recovery isn't performed during a crisis.
Backup & DR →Vendor remote access, controlled and logged.
Per-vendor accounts, sessions that are time-limited or approved on request, access scoped to only the equipment that vendor supports, and a log of every connection. Plus endpoint detection and response on the office side, where the attacks actually land first.
Cybersecurity →Internet for mills past the end of fibre.
Starlink Business deployment and management, fixed wireless where it exists, LTE failover, and UniFi networking across yards and buildings that were never designed for Wi-Fi. Sized for the traffic a mill really generates, with failover that kicks in before shipping notices.
Managed Network →Flat-rate managed IT for the office side.
Helpdesk, patching, Microsoft 365, endpoint security, and hardware lifecycle for office and management staff, priced per user per month with the numbers published. Floor systems and servers are scoped as a separate fixed line, because they don't fit a per-user model.
See real pricing →Tools and platforms we use in this sector.
The stack we deploy and manage for wood products clients.
UniFi networking
Switching, firewalling, and Wi-Fi across offices, floors, and yards, with the VLAN structure that keeps OT and IT apart.
Veeam
Image-based backup and disaster recovery for ERP, production servers, and office systems, with verified restores.
EDR / MDR
Managed endpoint detection and response on office machines, the usual entry point for ransomware.
Microsoft 365 + Entra ID
Email, documents, and identity for office staff, with conditional access and MFA enforced through Intune.
Starlink Business
Primary or failover connectivity for mills outside town fibre, deployed and managed by us across northern BC.
Custom ERP / inventory systems
Production, inventory, and shipping systems we build and operate for wood products businesses when off-the-shelf doesn't fit.
Common questions from mill operators.
Can you segment our production network without shutting down the mill?
Mostly, yes, but it takes planning. We map what talks to what first, then stage changes during scheduled maintenance windows or between shifts. The riskiest step is usually moving optimizer and PLC traffic onto its own network segment, so we coordinate that with your equipment vendors and millwrights rather than surprising them. Expect a phased project over a few weeks, not a big-bang cutover on a Tuesday.
Do you actually understand production systems, or just office IT?
Both. We build and run ERP and inventory systems for wood products operations in northern BC, so we know what a tally, a load slip, and a shipping manifest look like in practice, not just in a demo. We can support and back up your existing system, connect it to scale or scanner data, or scope a replacement if it has reached end of life. It depends on the state of what you have, which is why we start with an assessment.
What happens when our sales and shipping system goes down mid-shift?
That is the exact scenario we plan for. The goal is twofold: a documented manual fallback so shipping does not stop dead, and a tested restore process with a known recovery time so the outage is measured in hours, not days. If your current provider cannot tell you how long a full ERP restore takes, nobody has tested it. We test ours.
Our equipment vendor needs remote access to their machines. How do you handle that?
Vendor access is legitimate and necessary. What we remove is the always-on remote tool sitting on an unpatched machine. We set up controlled access instead: a separate account per vendor, sessions that are time-limited or approved on request, access scoped to only the systems that vendor supports, and a log of who connected and when. Vendors handle this fine. They already work this way at larger mills.
What does managed IT cost for a mill?
Office and management staff are priced per user per month. In the BC market that typically runs $100 to $250 per user depending on the tier, and our three tiers with real numbers are published on our pricing page. Production servers, OT network gear, and shared floor systems do not fit a per-user model, so we scope those separately as a fixed monthly line. No surprise hourly bills for covered work.
Our mill is outside town fibre. What are the realistic options?
Usually some combination of Starlink Business, fixed wireless where a local provider has line of sight, and LTE failover. We design around the mill's actual traffic: ERP sync, vendor remote sessions, cameras, and phones. We deploy and manage Starlink across northern BC, and we will tell you plainly what each option can and cannot carry before you sign anything.
Find out where your mill is exposed.
Book a 30-minute scoping call. We'll look at your network layout, your ERP backup, and your vendor access, and tell you plainly what's fine and what isn't. No pressure.
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