Innovation is considered the ultimate drive for business success. Fast growing furniture imports from China have become a controversial topic within U.S. wood and furniture industries. Low-cost production, which is stereotypically considered as the major competitive advantage of the Chinese-made products, has received considerable attention by a large body of...
Sawmills are very complex systems that involve many manufacturing processes. The variability of their raw material adds further to this complexity as each log has characteristics that determine its processing path. Therefore, computer simulation is a very useful technique for analyzing sawmill performance. This thesis describes a simulation computer model...
Innovativeness, or the propensity of a firm to create and/or adopt new products, process and business systems, has been measured using several methods in previous research. Examples of theses methods include current technology, self-evaluation, research and development funding, the number of new products, and intellectual property. In addition to the...
Lead-user research is a relatively new marketing research technique, and it has not seen much use in the forest sector. Lead-user research is designed to capture not just the needs of the customer in their own voice but also to involve actual users of goods and/or services in their development....
We studied the feasibility of using end-grain characteristics to match individual boards and cants back to their parent Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii) logs. After reviewing marking/reading and biometric automated identification systems, we focused on end-grain biometrics because they appear to have the most promise for sawmills. Biometric identification requires that every...
In the forest products business and management literature, one common categorization of different types of innovation is product innovation, process innovation and business systems innovation. Forest products companies have long placed high emphasis on process innovations, which are related to yield maximization, manufacturing efficiency and operating costs reduction. This is...