High-quality timber, careful craftsmanship, and premium standards – can the production of such a classic product as pine mouldings be modernized? Automation and digitalization have been a strategic development direction at the woodworking company AS “Hornbaek Baltic” for the past five years, says production director Jānis Dišlers. Production efficiency has been significantly improved not only by a new-generation optimization line, planers, and other machinery, but also by a digital tracking system. What exact solution has the company in Ādaži implemented?
“Hornbaek Baltic” is an experienced woodworking company – operating in Latvia since 2006, while its parent company “Hornbaek” in Denmark has been active since the 1960s. Its core products are painted and unpainted pine interior finishing mouldings, manufactured in Ādaži and mainly exported to Scandinavia and Central Europe. As with any large-scale manufacturing operation, accurate production process tracking plays a crucial role, including material flows, machinery productivity, and human resource management. It is essential that data is quickly and accurately available for making informed decisions when planning processes and workforce allocation.
“As part of our process digitalization efforts, we paid special attention to improving and securing personnel tracking processes. A very effective solution in manufacturing is a personnel access turnstile, which ensures both precise time tracking and prevents unauthorized persons from entering the company,” says Jānis Dišlers.
Turnstile system – support for personnel management and accurate tracking
In manufacturing, people remain the most important resource for carrying out operations. “Hornbaek Baltic” operates in two shifts, and during one shift, 50–60 employees work across several workshops in Ādaži in different positions. Previously, employees would arrive at work, greet the security guard, and report to their supervisor – the workshop foreman – who tracked working hours in a simple Excel file and entered the data into the payroll system at the end of the month. This manual tracking process had several disadvantages that created unnecessary additional work.
To introduce an automatic and accurate tracking system that would support not only human resources (HR) management but also accounting processes, “Hornbaek Baltic” implemented a new solution at the end of 2025 – a turnstile integrated with workforce time-tracking software. The project was successfully implemented with support from the digitalization support programme for small, medium-sized, and large enterprises administered by the Investment and Development Agency of Latvia (LIAA) under the Recovery and Resilience Facility.
“With this system, we have solved both security issues and ensured accurate working time accounting.” – Jānis Dišlers, Production Director
The turnstile itself – a full-height metal access gate – is a relatively simple solution supplemented by software that transfers data to other management systems. The collected data is then used according to operational needs – in accounting for payroll calculations, in the HR department for workforce management, and by production supervisors for planning daily operations. Thanks to the tracking system, every employee can view precise information on hours worked and workplace locations via computer or mobile phone.
The software linked to the turnstile also provides valuable organizational data for production management. “In the morning, we immediately know who has and has not arrived at work, which allows us to quickly redistribute workforce resources between different workstations and maintain uninterrupted production processes. This helps us operate at maximum efficiency from the very start of the day,” explains Lelde Kaļinka, Sales Manager at “Hornbaek Baltic”. Through digitalization, the company has resolved many important human resource management challenges, improved work planning efficiency, adapted more easily when needed, and made the payroll system more transparent for employees by basing it on real data and eliminating inaccuracies.
Companies that embrace technology will continue to grow
A competitive and development-oriented company keeps pace with the times and takes advantage of digitalization and automation opportunities, says Jānis Dišlers. This is equally important in the timber production sector. “Only those who master technology will survive,” states the director of the “Hornbaek Baltic” factory.
In addition to the recently implemented turnstile system, the company has introduced several other digitalization and automation solutions that provide comprehensive tracking of material flows, production processes, machinery usage, and workforce management throughout the factory. Already today, some tasks previously carried out manually through visual inspection of timber are being replaced by AI-trained scanners that accurately assess, cut, and sort timber materials.
The factory director emphasizes that work planning will gradually become increasingly easier thanks to AI tools, which are already highly useful assistants. However, experienced foremen still cannot be fully replaced by AI in production planning. In the future, “Hornbaek Baltic” plans to continue developing digitalization and automation processes in several directions, including AI visual recognition, planning, and security systems.
“We work with living wood – 1,000 meters today are not the same 1,000 meters as yesterday, which means we must remain flexible and adapt quickly to different situations and results. Quality control is essential for our final products, so we are actively developing various defect detection solutions to identify and eliminate issues as quickly and efficiently as possible. Technology is evolving very rapidly, so the direction we are heading in is AI-powered visual scanning.” – Jānis Dišlers, Production Director
Another development direction for the company is production flow and process planning, where AI and other digital tools can also provide valuable support. To implement these successfully and make processes more efficient, employee involvement and training are equally important.
“It is essential to have the skills to work with AI and a basic understanding of how it functions – then everything works. This is and will remain one of the key challenges of the future. The positive aspect is that if a person is open to new knowledge and not afraid of innovation, there will always be opportunities to grow, acquire new skills, and become a valuable part of the production team. Training can still be provided, but in the future factories will require different core competencies – greater technical understanding, the ability to work with automated equipment, and readiness to continuously learn and adapt to change,” predicts Jānis Dišlers.
Given the positive experience so far with attracting co-financing, “Hornbaek Baltic” also hopes to continue using support opportunities for implementing automation and new digital solutions in the future.
Latvian entrepreneurs have access to a wide range of state and European Union-funded support instruments for business development, available through the unified business portal business.gov.lv and its subsite liaa.business.gov.lv. There, companies can find information about various programmes – ranging from support for innovation and new product development, export promotion, and international cooperation opportunities to grants for business digitalization, technology implementation, and productivity improvement.
The project is co-financed by the European Union Recovery Fund (NextGenerationEU) under the Cohesion Policy Programme 2021–2027. The preparation of this article was funded by the Recovery Fund, and the views and opinions expressed are solely those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the European Union or the European Commission. Neither the European Union nor the European Commission can be held responsible for them.
