The global forestry industry plays a crucial role in uplifting the worldwide economy and also has a significant impact on the environment that we reside in. More than 57% of Sweden is covered in forests. Sweden holds less than 1% of the global commercial forest areas and offers 10% of sawn timber, pulp, and paper traded across the international market. With so much logging for production going on, how has Sweden managed to expand its timber sector?
The answer behind that is that Sweden plants more trees than it cuts down. While Sweden realizes the significance of wood for its national economy, the forestry industry employs more than 60,000 people to make the forest a national resource economically and socially.
Despite all the positive statistics, Sweden’s forestry policies and the timber industry are not without any challenges. Let’s check out what are those challenges that all the wood supply chain sectors are grappling with.
Impact of COVID-19 on the Supply Chain Processes
Let’s be frank, there is only one topmost supply chain challenge for the year 2021. COVID-19 continues to upset the economies, even in nations that have the pandemic under control. The timber market is experiencing a variety of hurdles in global supply chains due to the COVID-19 outbreak. There has been a steadily growing demand for wood logs. But due to a slowdown in supply chain processes and the lack of manpower, there are fewer purchases of logs to be processed.
With the growing supply chain crisis, freight forwarders are expected to experience a significant supply chain improvement in the upcoming days of 2021. It might be the time to stop concentrating much on supply chain visibility and invest more on resources that aid in improving supply chain challenges and complexity.
But the question arises, how can companies make their supply chain process more productive, enjoyable, and financially successful amidst these challenges and pains of manual processes?
That’s where supply chain automation comes into place! Take a look at how.
Support from Digital Supply Chain
With the rapid modernization and shift towards the digital revolution, global supply chain management will soon turn into complete artificial intelligence by adopting digital technologies. It’s the covid-19 that has spotlighted the need for logistics automation. Hence, reducing the dependency on workers as well as other resources.
Adopting a single-sourced system could be the lowest-cost solution that will help mitigate supply chain disruption. Improving efficiency, such as updating and streamlining processes, will serve the pathways for the forestry industry to keep moving towards sustainability and efficiently optimize the workflow.
End-to-End Visibility Over Supply Chain Processes
Gaining end-to-end visibility over your entire supply chain is a challenge in itself. It’s the same old challenge that supply chain professionals have been working to overcome for ages. In the era of digital transformation, 360-degree visibility comes from technology and tools integration, including anything that contains an IoT device or intelligence tool to provide real-time production response. Since managing supplies within the forestry supply chain is surprisingly complex, automation becomes particularly important there.
Resolving Interruptions and Managing Operations
Flexibility and resilience are crucial traits for organizational success in an ever-changing supply chain environment. But with the increasing rate of disruption and change, it's essential to focus on dealing with disruption. This becomes a huge operational challenge for the forestry industry. That means it requires establishing a consolidated platform to manage all important events from one unified workspace. This is where the digital supply chain can play a crucial role. With a strong digital infrastructure in place, such as an API, you can easily model the optimal responses to organizing large-scale interruptions much before time, and you can be prepared for unpredictable situations.
Getting More Value from Data
Upgrading to intelligent and digital data analysis has always been a challenging block for many supply chain organizations. But integrating a machine learning process can provide a greater value than you can imagine. For easing the management of large-scale logistics data and transportation forecasting, you need a data analytics system that helps in the significant improvement of the process. By doing so, you will be able to build a more proactive and efficient supply chain during uncertain times.
So, if you have been holding back on advancing your supply chain, it’s time to reconsider. For information on this, don’t hesitate to check out our website. We thrive to help our customers achieve supply chain success.