Related Expressions

Value chain, logistics chain, demand chain, supply chain management

Explanation

A supply chain can be defined as a physical network of entities (firms/companies) through which materials, information and cash flows. The supply chain starts with a raw material and ends with the customer that consumes the products produced by the supply chain.

Considerable work has been carried out to optimise manufacturing, warehousing and transportation operations in isolation. The last two decades, the focus has shifted to optimising processes that cross company borders. The competition has changed from company against company to supply chain against supply chains. The improvement and optimisation of processes across companies are included in the concept supply chain management.

Applying the supply chain concept to the wood sector implies that the wood supply chain starts with the harvesting of standing forest, and end when wood based products has been delivered to final consumers. This makes it possible to imagine thousands of different wood supply chains as a large number of products use forests as raw material, eg. solid wood products, paper based products, furniture or other products containing parts of wood, wood composites and products where chemicals from wood are extracted and used.

In forestry it is quite common to consider only the first part of the supply chain – from harvesting to delivery at industrial locations. A large fraction of material flows in the wood supply chain is of diverging nature. That is; one raw material is transformed to numerous final or semi-finished products. For example one stem is cut into several different log products that are delivered to several different customers. In the sawmilling industry a small number of log raw materials are transformed into a large number of finished or semi-finished products. Hence, most wood supply chains consider only a small fraction of the raw materials extracted from the forest.

Application/usage in Indisputable KEY

Indisputable KEY has its main focus in wood procurement processes and lumber manufacturing. One key objective is to establish traceability in the wood supply chain and to utilise this to improve processes in the wood supply chain. The consortium in Indisputable KEY include companies in wood supply, lumber manufacturing, pole production, window manufacturing and third parties such as manufacturers of forest machines, companies with expertise in traceability technology and software developers.

It is imperative that the data is to be used across companies to optimise operations within each company as well as operations that cross company borders. To enhance utilisation of data, emphasis is put on development of communication standards, where electronic messages can be used to securely transfer data between the ERP systems of the different companies.

Economical as well as environmental performance will be measured with a supply chain perspective, meaning that they must be applicable for supply chain processes. Development of these Key Performance Indicators is a significant challenge.

Institutions with teaching capabilities

Norwegian Forest and Landscape Institute has been responsible for courses in logistics and supply chain management for the forest sector. The courses have been offered at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences .

Outside of the Indisputable KEY consortium courses within wood logistics and supply chain management has been given by the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences , and the Technical University of Munich .

Available text books and training material

The Wood Supply Game has been developed based on the structure of the Beer Distribution Game from Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the USA. Two different versions exist. The manual version where 8 – 30 players participate in a classroom. It was developed by the Norwegian Forest and Landscape Institute and the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. More information can be found at:

• Flight simulator
• The wood supply game