Coalition to Improve Flooring Industry Information
Charlotte, NC, August 26--A coalition of industry representatives and research institutes has been awarded $87,864 through the Wood Education and Resource Center (WERC) to partially fund an initiative to improve the timeliness, scope and frequency of statistical information about U.S. wood floor manufacturing.
Coalition partners will fund the balance of the $176,200 project, dubbed the Wood Flooring Information Initiative.
The WERC is operated by the Northeastern Area State & Private Forestry division of the USDA Forest Service to enhance opportunities for sustained forest products production in the eastern hardwood region of the U.S.
To more effectively compete in today’s global environment, U.S. wood flooring manufacturers need accurate and timely information about domestic raw material consumption, flooring production and inventory. Publicly available industry information is out-dated, overly simplistic and widely distrusted by the industry. Privately produced reports are prohibitively expensive and suffer from similar deficiencies in timeliness and thoroughness.
The first phase of the Wood Flooring Information Initiative will be comprehensive survey of U.S. wood flooring manufacturers. The survey is currently in development and testing and will go out to the industry during the first week of October 2005.
The second and loftier objective is to create a mathematical model of the wood floor manufacturing industry from the survey results that will generate quarterly estimates of performance based on regular data inputs from a small, but representative, sample of producers. While growth and yield modeling is common in the forestry sector, this will be the first attempt to model a wood-manufacturing sector.
If proven effective in an industry setting, such an approach would have widespread application in the hardwood lumber industry and other hardwood manufacturing sectors.
For additional information, contact Dan Meyer, project coordinator for the Wood Flooring Information Initiative, at (704) 543-4408 or dan@hardwoodreview.com
