Forest companies compete in a true global market, where keeping customers satisfied is the key to making and keeping business profitable. And it's no secret that the key to achieving high-level customer satisfaction is to supply what your customers need when they need it. To forest companies, this means having the ability to effectively manage every aspect of the supply chain – from fiber supply, through manufacturing, to customer delivery.

Although optimizing supply chain management isn't a unique concept in any industry, the unique requirements of your customers make it especially challenging. And SAP solutions for timberlands and solid wood are designed to help you meet the challenge by targeting those requirements.

Specifically, SAP solutions target your need to provide wood product in various forms. Your sawmills can produce and supply finished wood product ready for shipment to customers, or wood fiber ready for shipment to pulp-and-paper or engineered-wood facilities. To you, this means source-material planning and consumption that ensures timely output of both products. And to SAP, it means providing solutions that recognize the production and supply of wood product, in any form, as part of an end-to-end, integrated supply chain – from forest to customer.

Recognizing this need, SAP solutions for timberlands and solid wood:

• Capture end-use demand for various forms of fiber relative to available supply. In particular, the solutions address the industry-specific issue of the "best time to cut" a specific section of forest to meet the fiber needs of sawmills, pulp and paper mills, and other fiber users
• Include advanced planning and modeling functions that can help you improve forecast requirements for appropriate log species, size, and grade
• Support geographic information system (GIS) integration to provide you with graphical views of the forest status that reflect harvesting as well as replanting and maintenance activities

The analytics component of SAP solutions for timberlands and solid wood provides feedback, by customer and product, on supply chain performance, cost parameters, and profitability.