Lead time and quality driven transport strategies for the wood supply chain

Abstract

Fresh roundwood loses quality during storage at roadside primarily through blue stain and insect infestation leading to wood value loss. The potential of altitude zone-based risk forecasts to prioritize spruce sawlog piles at devaluation risk for unimodal and multimodal transport strategies was evaluated with a discrete event simulation model. This enabled tracking roundwood quality development through the supply chain as well as identifying and modelling the relationship between lead time and roundwood quality devaluation. Respective regression analyses showed that the procurement lead time is a significant predictor of the downgraded roundwood amount, explaining over 98% of the variance of downgraded wood. This knowledge was applied to provide practical decision support for procurement management. Presented transport strategies using roundwood quality forecasts significantly outperformed those currently being used by preventing, on average, 57% of the roundwood devaluation in a case study. Moreover, 73% of the devaluation could be avoided if up to 25% supplementary truck transport capacity was deployable in peak periods. If no additional self-loading trucks were available, still 67% of the devaluation could be prevented by using the bottleneck resource more efficiently through transferring 20% of the roundwood to rail wagons leading to a more sustainable and resilient wood procurement.