Engineering the integrated wood supply system for a more competitive Canadian forest products industry

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The forest environment poses significant challenges to conducting industrial processes. The harsh working conditions, remoteness, numerous sources of variations cause uncertainties throughout the supply chain (SC) and negatively affect performance. While important gains are achievable through collaborative planning, other aspects requires specific interventions. One important obstacle to improved forest to mill wood flow is the lack of comprehensive and reliable data concerning forest, stem and processed wood inventories. High collection cost explain only part of this shortcoming. Important for conventional operations, new products such as fiber for bioenergy and biorefining require adapted inventory and data acquisition systems if industrial requirements are to be aligned with in-woods capacity. Means are not yet in place to insure such alignment is possible. Another obstacle impeding more efficient wood supply chain operation can be associated to important variations induced by climatic and site conditions that make the delivery process difficult to predict. While diminishing these variations is not always possible or economically feasible, it is expected that advanced modeling techniques allow to anticipate, predict and suggest course of operations.