Reshaping Forestry Trade with Digitalization

The ongoing digitization is transforming the business environment in a variety of different industries. As a result, business manufacturers are gaining more competitive advantages by implementing these emerging technologies and new digital solutions. While the digital revolution has changed most industries, its influence on the forestry trade has been comparatively limited. So far the industry stayed behind the others in investing into the digital transformation. But now, that seems to be changing.

Recently the Egyptian customs decided to implement ACID regulation to secure and facilitate global trade, which will act as the unique international tool to create up-to-date supply chain security standards. The aim is to streamline the end-to-end management of transporting goods across borders, including timber. As Egypt imports large volumes of timber, this new regulation will inevitably affect the forestry industry.

How Digitization Is Helping the Forestry Industry?

Nowadays, forestry and logistics companies are increasingly investing in digital transformation across their organizations. In fact, they are now focusing more on digital efforts to improve their supply chains. Studies suggest that most market executives feel that shifting towards automation will enable growth. Adopting automation, analytics, and business intelligence tools will allow them to make informed decisions and help in the efficient use of data. And by expanding the use of automation in forestry and trade activities, supply chain professionals will be in a better position to take the advantage of data-driven smart automation, which will boost efficiency and enable them to address the growing shortage of manufacturing labour.

Research shows that nearly 76.9% of the executives agree that technological evolutions have helped organizations to move towards a real-time economy while improving the efficiency of the business processes. The supply chain runs into complications most of the time. Therefore, preventing them before they occur is a sensible way to manage the situation. But if your employees are stuck with monotonous tasks, you will hardly see it coming. So how does automation help to tackle these issues? Now, that’s what we are here to help you with!

Breaking The Barrier of Speed and Process Challenges in Logistics

The traditional method of tracking freight movement, import/export activities, and keeping a manual spreadsheet for sawmills is a time-consuming process that reduces your productivity and growth potential. With manual processes, there are certain challenges that forestry trade and timber sawmills encounter. They are as follows:

• Improper measurement of timber in a short time
• Inaccurate and redundant data errors or reports
• Incorrect results
• Difficulties in tracking work progress
• Unsecured record keeping
• Gap in communication

Automation Across Your Extended Supply Chain

Digitization in wood supply and increased use of forest trade data are bringing both significant saving and efficiency development to the forest industry. Keeping updated stocks and organizing logistics activities are important to maximize the value of the forestry industry. But if the process takes too much time, the export of sawn timber may get delayed. Also, it would directly impact the final order to the end customer as a result the company may lose good faith.

To help you with that, Centersource has developed the Timber Exchange platform that offers over 80 smart tools. It contains a range of interesting features and a unified workspace for exporters, importers, freight forwarders to improve accountability, transparency, and productivity of the timber industry. The smart tools not only allow trading counterparties and employees to organize sales, logistics but also help to efficiently capture the legal documentation. As a part of the digital supply chain platform, you will experience the importance of collaborative logistics operation and the improved quality of deal processes. Let’s look at how Timber Exchange by Centersource helps in managing supply chain activities and global trade management activities.

Additionally, Centersource is constantly developing the platform to be up to date to the latest government regulations. For example, the recently introduced Egyptian customs ACID regulations are now incorporated into the platform, minimising the needed bureaucracy for Timber Exchange users.

Centersource’s Intelligent Features at A Glance

• Automates the whole ACID workflow process
• Create instructions for importers to submit to NAFEZA without any further discrepancy for later!
• The platform notifies the counterparties of required actions so you don’t have to worry about missed deadlines!
• Verify ACID elements (for forwarders + shipping lines)
• Drafts all shipping documents automatically
• Automate adding ACID elements on all shipping documents
• Send all documents to NAFEZA via CargoX from inside Timber Exchange.
• With the Timber Exchange platform designed by Centersource Technologies, you do not need to work in multiple non-synchronized systems. That’s because all of the most important process-related activities are consolidated within a unified dashboard.
• Lower language barriers, less chasing & more effective cooperation
• Allows the forestry industry to maintain transparent business relationships with Egyptian customers after the launching of the ACI system.

Your Path Ahead

So, you see how a digital supply chain can offer you global visibility across all your trading counterparties and trading activities from one unified system? It includes container tracking, freight forwarding monitoring process, invoice management, integrated customs documentation capturing system, and more. With so many smart features at your fingertips do you still want to wait back? We suggest, don’t wait back anymore, test our platform! Yes, register with us today and take a free trial for more information!