FEATURE Story By Christopher Glander
CAN THE OPEN exchange of information help ease the current as well as future lumber crises?
Fixing the lumbering lumber supply chain y contractor, Monte, had good reason to be stressed, having spent much of the current lumber crisis wondering if he could scrape together the right materials to keep his projects moving and his construction business viable without frustrating too many customers along the way. And that meant Monte had little reason to discuss the nuances of the lumber supply chain with me, the oddly inquisitive client who had hired him to build a deck. The same could be said of Monte’s supplier, Mike, a lumber wholesaler who was contending with similar issues: a confounding lack of timely insight into his supply chain, difficulty providing his customers with clarity around product availability, and as a result, an uncomfortable degree of business uncertainty. Yet both Monte and Mike were kind enough to answer my questions and feed my supply chain fascination by providing a candid inside perspective on the lumber shortage’s impact on their business, its likely causes and potential pathways for avoiding similar squeezes in the future. It was in the latter area that I could share a bit of insight with them, based on my knowledge of the building materials industry, the workings of its supply chain, and the digital tools that can help resolve issues like these.
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n Building Products Digest n July 2021
To be clear, there is no silver bullet — no single, unilateral solution to the lumber shortage. There are, however, steps that the various segments of the supply chain can take multilaterally, and to some extent collaboratively, to relieve the current bottleneck, reduce the risk of recurring shortages, give people like Mike and Monte more business certainty, and with it, hopefully (and admittedly somewhat selfishly), the materials to finish my stalled deck project.
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. Network the entire lumber supply chain. “I am extremely pleased with our first quarter results, as our businesses delivered Weyerhaeuser’s highest quarterly Adjusted EBITDA on record despite severe winter weather and supply chain disruptions,” Devin W. Stockfish, Weyerhaeuser’s president and chief executive officer, said this spring in announcing the company’s first-quarter 2021 earnings. When the very market conditions that prompt upstream lumber suppliers to rejoice cause major disruptions downstream, that’s a clear sign that the supply chain needs retooling. Rather than begrudging lumber mills their record profits, how about instead learning from the current shortage and taking steps to head off the next one by digitally networking the supply chain, so everyone is sync’ed to the same, shared Building-Products.com
