What does the pallet factory of the future look like? You may have envisioned hovering vehicles, humanoid robots and space-age technology. But what you may have forgotten about is the importance of data to drive production efficiency. A California company, Zira, is charting the future today with its theme, “Work like it’s 2050.”
Zira uses AI Vision in pallet operations to improve operational efficiency, lumber yield, production accounting, energy efficiency and much more. And what has been achieved so far with artificial intelligence (AI) may be just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to driving innovation in pallet operations.
Zira is a leader in Telematics, a field that combines telecommunications and informatics to transmit, store, and receive information from remote vehicles or devices. Telematics allows for the remote monitoring and control of assets through the use of communication networks and data processing. This means you can have extra sets of eyes at key places in your facility to improve operations even when your managers are somewhere else at the plant or even on vacation. Automating data capture based on video provides real-time data for immediate assessment and problem solving. AI enables analytical capabilities that are difficult to achieve with traditional methods.
Pallet Enterprise recently conducted an interview with Elhay Farkash, the CEO of Zira, to discuss the technology behind its platform and vision systems. If you want to know how to achieve the pallet factory of 2025 today, see what Zira can do for you.
Pallet Enterprise: What is the story behind the development of Zira?
Elhay Farkash: We have always been a software company focused on artificial intelligence (AI). We started off as a funded industrial research project by MIT, UC Berkeley and U Chicago for energy management in the industrial world. We explored how to use real-time data streaming from sensors in order to help industrial manufacturers improve their energy consumption. It was a successful project and achieved 17% improvement in energy consumption just by helping make decisions using real-time data.
Pallet Enterprise: How did your team move from working with energy management to the pallet industry and other business sectors?
Elhay Farkash: You know, our journey from energy management to pallets and other industries started with a big realization: if you want to save energy in a factory, you’ve got to focus on uptime. When machines are running but not producing, like an air compressor humming away with leaks, that’s just wasted energy. Our platform, Zira, which means “arena” in Hebrew, was built to bring all that data together and make it actionable. Instead of just showing numbers on a dashboard, we use AI to analyze it and tell people exactly what to do next.
When we looked at the pallet industry, we saw the same kind of problem. Take a Viking machine making pallets: if the conveyor gets backed up because the forklift driver doesn’t clear the stacks fast enough, the whole line stops. We found that for many of our clients, up to 80% of their downtime was just waiting on a forklift. Zira fixes that by sending alerts to drivers before the line jams up, keeping everything moving. It’s the same deal if a machine needs maintenance or a line needs more boards, we optimize based on what’s actually happening at each site.
Then, one customer threw us a curveball: they wanted to track production by board feet, not just pallets. Regular sensors couldn’t handle that, so we brought in AI-Vision. These let us measure all sorts of things, like lumber lengths or machine performance, in a way that fits each facility. That’s when we really started to see Zira’s potential to work across industries. Our platform, originally built for energy, now gives everyone from big enterprises to small businesses a clear, unified view of their operations, with simple tools to keep things running smoothly. It’s all about giving people the control they need to succeed.
Pallet Enterprise: How can your technology help pallet companies comply with sustainability and environmental requirements, from waste reduction to environmental audits?
Elhay Farkash: At Zira, sustainability is in our DNA. We started with energy savings, and that mindset carries through to everything we do. For pallet companies, our technology helps tackle sustainability and environmental requirements in a practical way. We track every piece of the puzzle: electricity, yield, waste, even carbon emissions. Everything has a sustainability footprint, and our platform gives you a clear view of it all.
For example, we can pinpoint where waste is happening, like excess scrap or inefficient machine use, and suggest actions to cut it down. This helps with compliance for sustainability audits by giving you detailed, real-time reports on your sustainability metrics.
Plus, we support bigger goals like working toward net-zero emissions. Whether it’s reducing your carbon footprint or improving overall efficiency, Zira’s unified dashboard makes it easy to monitor progress and stay on track with sustainability standards. It’s about giving pallet companies the tools to not just meet requirements but actually make a difference.
Pallet Enterprise: You also worked with Millwood. How did you use your technology to help Millwood?
Elhay Farkash: We work with many of the big names in the pallet industry and throughout the industry supply chain. With Millwood, we focused on boosting their lumber yield. We used our “Live Cut” Solution, which combines AI cameras and vision telematics to maximize every log’s potential. Picture this: we stream each log as it gets on the ramp, and our AI vision measures it with pinpoint accuracy, then shows the operator the best cut pattern on big screen TVs in real time. It’s like drawing a box around the log to say, “Cut here for the most yield.” This led to an incredible return on investment. It’s the same principle we apply everywhere, whether it’s a pallet dismantling station or a repair line. Our AI vision captures millions of pixels, and our AI makes sense of them, no matter the industry. We’ve got wood customers, dairy farms, you name it. For example, in dairy, we count 300 bottles a minute and spot spilt milk to catch machine issues. That same logic helps us count pallets or boards at speed and detect defects like mold. Each industry has its unique AI model parameters, but all our models learn from each other, constantly expanding.
We also work with Ongweoweh Corp, monitoring their entire lumber production line, from cant sawing to resaws to trim saws. We put cameras on multiple machines, each doing its own job but connected to give a full picture. It’s like giving managers an extra set of eyes that never blinks, helping them maximize output and efficiency across the board. Whether it’s a sawmill, a resaw, or a nailing machine, Zira’s there to drive production and keep things running smoothly.
Pallet Enterprise: Have some of your customers used telematics for quality control at the end of their process or for operator training?
Elhay Farkash: Many of our customers use Zira for training. Our system highlights issues in real time, like slow cycle times, incorrect operations, or missed steps and suggests corrective actions that managers can share with operators. It’s a hands-on way to support continuous improvement and build a stronger, more consistent workforce.
At the same time, Zira’s AI vision handles quality control across every model we deploy. We automatically detect things like board cracks, nail pops, and incorrect sizes based on a massive database of pallet examples collected from across the industry. That depth of data allows our models to flag problems quickly and accurately, giving you eyes on every pallet without needing extra labor.
Pallet Enterprise: What are some of the best use case applications that you see for pallets right now with Zira?
Elhay Farkash: A lot of pallet companies start with three main things when they use Zira. The first is the dismantling process, our AI vision counts and measures the boards coming off the pallets, tracks yield, and even catch if someone’s taking apart the wrong ones such as 48×40. Then there’s the repair station, where we track cycle times and spot anything slowing things down. And finally, trailer tracking, our devices go on the trailers to monitor fill levels, track movement, and send alerts when they’re full and ready for pickup, which really helps with scheduling and logistics.
Pallet Enterprise: Are there things that your cameras can’t do now that that you think they’ll be able to do here in the near future?
Elhay Farkash: Our AI vision is incredibly powerful and already runs at scale across hundreds of machines and sites, delivering real-time insights that drive real results. If we can see it through the lens, we can model it, whether it’s counting boards, measuring yield, or spotting process issues. What makes it even more exciting is that it keeps getting smarter every day. With hundreds of millions of image frames flowing through our system, each one helps refine and sharpen our models automatically. That constant self-improvement gives us a major edge over anyone just entering the space. Today, we operate in 2D, but we’re moving into 3D by adding depth through dual cameras and pushing into 4D by combining visual data with sensors to track space, time, and environment markers all at once.
Pallet Enterprise: What does it mean to work like it is 2050?
Elhay Farkash: Working like it’s 2050 means getting the kind of real-time, intelligent insights that used to take massive systems, months of setup, and teams of consultants. My co-founders and I came from the world of ERP like Oracle and SAP, so we know what traditional systems do well, but also where they fall short. With Zira, we realized that by simply installing a few cameras and streaming data to the cloud, you can start generating critical operational insights almost immediately, no deep technical knowledge required. Our system is plug-and-play. Within a week, you’re getting AI-powered suggestions, tracking performance, and making better decisions based on live data. That’s what it means to work like it’s 2050, getting future-level visibility and control, today.
Pallet Enterprise: Zira doesn’t seem to be a traditional ERP. Your solution seems to help bring better data and analytics to an ERP. Am I wrong?
Elhay Farkash: You’re right in some ways, we’re not a traditional ERP, but we also didn’t build Zira to sit alongside one. We come from the ERP world, and we know both what it can do and what it can’t. ERP systems are great at logging transactions and managing structured workflows, but they weren’t built for real-time visibility, adaptability, or intelligent decision-making. That’s why we built Zira.
I like to say: a traditional ERP is like a rotary phone; it gets the call done. Zira is the smartphone. It can still make the call, but it also does so much more. It sees what’s happening on your floor in real time, suggests what to do next, and connects to everything, from your payroll to your inventory to your customer systems.
We didn’t just evolve ERP, we leapfrogged it. Yesterday you wanted ERP. Today, you need live operational intelligence. That’s what Zira delivers. If you want to work like it’s 2050, we’re already there.
