At the root of many issues currently affecting the small-scale UK timber supply chain lie difficulties in communication. These stem from three characteristics of the industry: the physical, outdoor nature of jobs; substantial differences in knowledge and experience across different cohorts; and the ensuing lack of standardisation. The upshot is a general difficulty in coordinating efforts which is often felt as a lack of individual agency and industry reliability.

Physical nature of Jobs

Many people reported their difficulties reaching and engaging woodland managers, harvesting contractors and sawmillers, which frustrates the process of managing woods and procuring timber. This appears to be, at least in part, due to the nature of harvesting and milling that requires them to spend most of their time actively working the machines. Once engaged, communication challenges remain: woodland owners and managers feel they have a lack of agency over forestry operations; and construction companies struggle with a lack of information and the pace of transaction progress.

One factor that was found to enable these types of dynamics was the widespread absence of contracts or formal agreements made prior to the woodland operations taking place, leading to misunderstandings and mutually inconvenient outcomes. The presence of a contract, however, is by no means a guarantee of smooth operations with clauses often unenforceable. The multiple variables that make up any woodland job - such as: weather, accessibility, site condition - make it extremely complex to provide pricing and stick reliably to timings for jobs. As one harvesting contractor stated:

Differences of knowledge

These issues are exacerbated by difficulties in acquiring detailed and relevant forestry and timber knowledge. Across different cohorts and levels of expertise, there are substantial differences in knowledge of standard industry practices. For those with less experience, a lack of knowledge of typical forestry practices makes engaging contractors difficult. Along the supply chain different roles bring with them significantly different perspectives and standards. This can lead to mistakes and misunderstanding when communicating things such as harvesting data, or product specifications.

With a significant proportion of the timber industry conducted by word-of-mouth, newcomers experience difficulties in accessing contractors and timber markets; and hauliers become the de facto middlemen. One participant helpfully summarised this dynamic when describing hauliers’ reach: “They know everything before anyone else”.

What role can CloudForest play

Our platform aims to create a stronger, more cohesive network that benefits everyone from forest to construction. Supporting better communication is at the heart of this.

Of course digital tools make it dramatically easier to share, store, find and verify information. Our platform today, through timber listings and automatic timber alerts, already supports the efficient sharing of information about timber parcels. Critically, for this to translate into effective communication there also needs to be a common understanding of what the information means, and the context it sits in. Sometimes building this common understanding can be addressing a simple knowledge gap. For example, multiple sawmills told us they wished people sent them better photos of prospective timber parcels. Based on their input we’ve put together this guide on How to take good photos of timber. Better photos, combined with benchmark timber prices, and a better understanding of harvesting costs¹ , all start to feed into a better common understanding of the value of a parcel of timber.

When we initially sought to understand the challenges people face along the supply chain, we did it solely to inform the work of CloudForest. The conversations were so rich, however, that we decided to share our findings as a step towards the much needed increased understanding by different participants² . A problem shared is a problem halved after all.

We continue to speak with people along the supply chain as we design, test and iterate our platform. We love to chat so get in touch if you’d like a demo of where we’ve got to so far, or just want to share your thoughts.

Hello@cloudforest.market

1. Watch this space…
2. If we’d known we were going to share our findings we would have also asked people what was going well!