Summary

  • A wood for good/TRADA focus group exercise highlighted the need for greater timber education and one-stop-shop solution providers.
  • The timber trade has to provide lifecycle analysis data to earn its share of the zero carbon home revolution.
  • Working with customers to improve logistics efficiency is key.

“The customer wants what the customer gets”. That was the title of The Timber Trade Federation’s tough talking annual members’ conference last week. The theme was even more pithily encapsulated in “Customers, eh?”, the headline of a punchy presentation from Charles Trevor, managing director of the wood for good campaign.

The big question posed by the event was whether the timber industry is making enough effort to find out precisely what its customers want and then providing it. The big conclusion was that it wasn’t, or at least, could do better.

And the consensus among the speakers was that this was more of an issue now than ever for three reasons; because today’s customers are more demanding and want more and greater depth of technical and other specification information; because rival material sectors are listening to the market and providing the right answers; and because, with environmental criteria increasingly shaping the way people buy products and do business, the timber sector has a key commercial and marketing advantage, but risks losing out by not sufficiently communicating with customers.

Attitudes and perceptions

Mr Trevor put the issue in sharp relief by giving the 85-strong conference audience at London’s Building Centre a taster of a recent market study conducted by wood for good with TRADA. The aim was to examine customers’ attitudes and perceptions of timber and identify reasons preventing its specification.

“We had focus groups in four locations, including architects, structural engineers and contractors,” said Mr Trevor. “They were asked about materials specification generally and, to avoid their answers being swayed or influenced, we didn’t tell them the timber sector was behind the project.” Some of the results, he added, do not make comfortable reading.

While focus group participants saw timber as sustainable and suitable for modern methods of construction (MMC), they thought it was less predictable than steel, and that contractors were less confident about using it than other materials. They felt that there were fewer well-known wood-specialist sub-contractors, timber products needed more maintenance and that there were not enough one-stop-shops providing complete supply and service solutions. “They also highlighted a lack of brands,” said Mr Trevor. “Brands give confidence and the only ones they could associate with timber were Finnforest, Velfac, Velux and Stewart Milne.”

The focus groups also commented on a perceived lack of technical information supporting timber. “The feeling was that the industry lacked an information resource of equivalent profile to The Concrete Centre or the Steel Construction Institute (SCI). TRADA was well-regarded, but considered less prominent.”

Initial conclusions from this market sounding, said Mr Trevor, was that specifiers and contractors needed better timber education, TRADA’s profile needed raising and that more timber construction technical and case study material had to be produced.

Stewart Baseley, executive chairman of the Home Builders Federation, highlighted the dangers of not paying the customer sufficient attention by raising the spectre of the collapse of the UK timber frame market after a 1983 World in Action TV documentary exposed faulty workmanship in the sector. Slack attitudes to quality lay at the heart of the problems, but poor education of builders in using timber frame was also implicated and poor communications resulted in isolated defects on specific sites being perceived as inherent faults with the construction method. “At the time I worked for Crest, which was 100% timber frame and we had to switch overnight to stay in business,” said Mr Baseley.

Today, he added, confidence in timber frame is restored, but there is a risk of a parallel with the 1983 crisis due to the pressure on construction to meet government targets to build only “zero carbon” homes by 2016 and a total of three million new sustainable houses by 2020. “We must avoid rushing to market with products that fail after three years and end up featuring on Watchdog,” he said. “We must also talk to customers and provide them with the services and products they’re asking for. It’s no good if we achieve the zero carbon timber frame home, but it looks like something from the planet Zarg and nobody buys it.”

Tom Paul, of Kingspan plc, highlighted the potential timber has to carve itself a profitable niche in the sustainable housing market with a presentation on the Lighthouse, developed by Kingspan Off-Site. It is the first design to achieve the top Level 6 under the government’s Code for Sustainable Homes – and it’s largely timber, based on structural insulated panels, with chestnut cladding, and the version built at the BRE Offsite exhibition incorporating a glulam portal frame.

But Mr Paul warned that if the timber industry doesn’t want to be left behind in this market by concrete and steel building, it had to match them in taking a co-ordinated approach on marketing and providing technical information and back-up.

“You need to provide us with robust solutions and systems and a full-on technical guide relating timber to the Code for Sustainable Homes,” he said. “In particular we need cradle-to-grave lifecycle analysis for timber products.”

“Timber – Friend of FoE?” was the theme taken by BRE chief executive Dr Peter Bonfield, looking at how rising environmentalism can play both for and against wood, depending on how well the industry promotes its products, educates customers and understands the market. “At the first BRE Offsite exhibition in 2003, you’d have been forgiven for thinking that the future of construction was steel. Timber was nowhere to be found. It was an opportunity wasted, a missed trick,” he said. “The BRE has also been approached by two of the country’s top contractors asking us how to engineer timber out of their buildings. It was because they were really worried about sourcing sustainable wood.”

Timber, he stressed, has made “huge progress” in the area of environmental certification and, more than any other building material, has the potential to “stir consumers’ emotions”. But the industry has to do more to understand and adapt to the environmental factors driving the market. “It’s not just about carbon, or PEFC versus FSC, it’s about understanding your whole eco-profile and communicating it to the customer,” he said. “And you have to understand the wider developments and their effect on your products and business. For instance, have you thought about the implications of the emergence of FTSE4Good, the FTSE index that rates businesses against corporate social responsibility standards, or how increasingly construction is focusing on not just the individual zero carbon home, but on creating whole sustainable communities?”

The industry, he added, has it “all to play for”. “Whether it’s timber friend or foe is down to you.”

With environmental and general corporate responsibility policies playing an ever greater role in business, even more emphasis is placed on logistics and minimising delivery road miles. According to Stephen King, SCA sales and marketing director, that demands even closer relationships with customers and industry co-ordination. “UK industry currently achieves 20% vehicle utilisation, which is ridiculously low,” he said. “We have to ask how to help customers still demanding small quantities next day… is it ethical to maintain the consequent level of lorry movements?”

He added SCA is looking at more sophisticated logistics solutions; more intermodal transport and using vehicles for carrying goods between customers to boost utilisation rates.

Industry collaboration

“It’s about customising our service to minimise waste and also industry collaboration,” he said. “We’ve worked together on certification. Let’s take the final steps collaborating on logistics and create distribution hubs to make our renewable material a truly sustainable one.”

Another pressure on the timber sector to get closer to the market to boost efficiency and cut waste will be growing competition for raw material. Currently, said Clive Suckling of PricewaterhouseCooper, there is sufficient raw material to meet global demand. But the future will see rapidly growing consumption, not only in the booming Chinese and Indian markets, but also the bio-fuel sector worldwide. “The EU goal is for 12% of electricity to be generated by renewables by 2012 and the talk is now of a target of 20% by 2020,” he said.

Given the growing complexity of giving customers what they want, both TTF chief executive John White and president Neil Donaldson also stressed the increasing urgency of the sector to work in concert. ‘The concrete sector is talking about forming one industry body with a budget of £10m,” said Mr White. “That’s the sort of effort we need to match.”

“It makes sense to work together,” said Mr Donaldson. “That’s why we recently held a summit of timber industry associations to set out common ground and find where we’re duplicating cost. Work is still taking place, but there’s a real willingness to take this step forward.”

The conference closed with a panel discussion and one member, Keith Fryer of T Brewer & Co, urged the audience not to be overawed by the challenges ahead. “We shouldn’t see the glass as half empty,” he said. “We cannot do it alone, we need to pull together, but if we do, we have incredible opportunities.”