Presented by Mark Brown, University of Sunshine Coast, Wednesday 20 November, 2013.
Change is hard, changing the way forest operations are planned and managed is very hard. Through the Australian Forest Operations Research Alliance (AFORA) within the Forest Industries Research Centre at the University of the Sunshine Coast there have been a number of forest supply chain R&D projects that show real opportunity to improve the economic outcome of forest supply chains in Australia.
Some are seeing limited uptake with industry partners while most come to a grinding halt when faced with the challenge of making operational change; stopped in their tracks with age old arguments like “But we have always done it this way” or “But our conditions are different so that will never work here”.
This presentation will highlight a few examples of the AFORA research outputs that show potential for improved supply chain outcomes, the types of changes that are required to see these R&D outputs converted to operational outcomes, discuss strategies to make these changes and briefly explore where the R&D could go from there. It will provide a good overview of the current forest operations research in Australia and hopes to facilitate discussion about how to make the effort of change achievable.
Presenter:
Mark is a researcher manager with over 15 years’ experience in forestry and biomass industry applied research in Canada and Australia. His focus is on research implementation for impact across the entire forest product and biomass supply chain. As the director of FIRC and AFORA, Mark’s experience in partnership building and research implementation is being applied with forestry and biomass collaborators nationally and internationally. Mark is on the editorial committee of the International Journal of Forest Engineering, an executive member of COST Action FP0902 on biomass harvesting, an ISOTC 248-sustainability criteria for bioenergy committee member, an advisor for INFRES-improved European forest biomass supply chains, and represents Australia on IEA Task – 43 for biomass supply.
