Consumers buy wood products in DIY stores and furniture. Being able to trace the wood’s origin is becoming of increasing importance for consumers. Previously this was difficult or near impossible on an item-by-item basis, but technology is enabling this, allowing consumers to track the journey of a piece of wood throughout the global supply chain.
With a traceability system in place, stakeholders can easily access information on a wood product’s attributes and characteristics, strengthening the transparency along the supply chain as goods change hands.
How Does Traceability Work Across the Supply Chain?
Traceability management in the supply chain refers to the origin and ownership changes of the wood. The main concepts of traceability revolve around the free flow of information, transparency, access to the information across the supply chain participants, efficient monitoring of the data, recorded identifications, and tracking of the entire life cycle of the product. The benefits of supply chain traceability are:
- Tracing the wood back to the origin
- Improving the integrity of the supply chain
- Tracking the wood from the source to the end consumer
- Performing rapid traceability analysis anytime
- Supporting multiple chains of custody models
To ensure authenticity and transparency between all counterparties, each traceability partner should be responsible for different roles of their own. The three main partners in a timber supply chain process are the importers, exporters, and freight forwarding companies. At the negotiation stage, the requirements for the Certificates of Origin and EUR1 are notified, and only compliant sellers with the certificates can place an offer. Having all of the information in one place makes the process easier for stakeholders to choose the offer they want to take ahead.
Timber Exchange and Traceability across the Supply Chain
Timber Exchange believes in a transparent and streamlined supply chain process and thus has come up with 100+ tools that help global stakeholders. A section of these tools is for correct documentation compliance and traceability. The incorrect format of documents or an incomplete document set can end up with the importer having to pay a substantial fine or the cargo getting blocked entirely.
The platform offers a tool with which you can keep track of and automatically draft the documents required for the trade based on the shipment and counterparty. You can also create and edit instructions for contracts, insurance, and necessary customs documents with pre-filled data that can be further verified by the importer.
Each step of the entire supply chain process at the Timber Exchange platform goes through step-by-step verification by both counterparties, which reduces errors and risks associated with the supply chain process.