Change in Sweden’s forest industry is running in tandem with the rapid development of a globalised business environment, and with the desire to optimise wood resources. A constant need to remain competitive is driving closer integration between Swedish sawmills and customers in global markets.

SCA Timber is responding by changing focus and production philosophy. “We’re taking much more responsibility for the end product, and for its distribution to customers,” said SCA Timber’s international marketing director Anders Ek. “We’re integrating service factors into our production, performing many non-traditional roles to add value and deepen relationships with strategic customers.”

SCA Timber has recently formed an international Industrial Components group, co-ordinating the needs of global customers.

“Supply chain is a central concept for us,” said Mr Ek. “It’s not what you produce but what you give to a customer/supplier partnership that’s important. ‘Customer focus’ is too nebulous as an expression. To create world-beating supply chains requires you to be practical; to look deeply into customers’ processes and understand their dynamics right to the point of the end user, in a domestic or building site setting.”

In adapting its business model to fit profitable supply chains, SCA Timber is looking to grow its business with the builders merchant sectors across Europe, including the UK and Scandinavia, by providing more ready-to-buy products. The company recently changed production at its Stugun mill from sawmilling to painting, setting up a line producing primed and painted cladding for the Scandinavian builders merchant market. “In the merchant sector in Sweden and the UK there’s strong demand for finished products,” said Mr Ek. “Creating the best supply chain means we must also provide the right distribution solutions for merchants.”

In working with a Sweden-based retailer of flat-pack furniture, SCA Timber is taking an approach akin to supply chain models in fast-moving consumer goods. R&D has extended even to the best kind of packaging for consumers to pick up when buying a shelving system produced at SCA’s Bollsta sawmill, in the retailer’s store. “In the past, this role would have been beyond sawmillers. Today, it’s essential to selling products profitably in a global business environment,” Mr Ek said.

SCA Timber has evolved from sawmiller to service-oriented business; from producing a broad spectrum of wood products with little refinement, to viewing manufacture as just one of four cornerstones of creating long-term value.