Woodnet portal adds e-procurement

By ADAM GIFFORD

Start-up wood industry portal Woodnet has signed up with electronic procurement specialist SupplyNet in a bid to draw traffic to its woodnet.co.nz site.

Woodnet subscribers will be able to buy vehicles, tyres, fuel and lubricants, office supplies, safety and fire equipment and beverages online.

Woodnet marketing director Phil Shacklady said the arrangement, announced at a timber industry conference in Rotorua last week, will give the portal more depth. So far it has consisted of a directory of suppliers, some industry-specific content and a simple trading board.

"The SupplyNet marketplace means we can bring together the spending power of the small companies, the contractors and one man bands, and give them access to the sort of discounts the larger companies have enjoyed," Mr Shacklady said.

He said Woodnet has no immediate plans to enable online timber trading.

"We've looked at the negotiation and settlement processes and decided when it came to logs it was too complicated for us to handle the negotiations on line. All buyers and sellers want is that we put them in touch with each other."

Woodnet expected to get revenue from subscriptions and from getting a margin on goods sold through the SupplyNet link. SupplyNet marketing manager Matt Caughey said SupplyNet is interested in partnering with companies that can bring together communities of interest.

SupplyNet, which uses the Commerce One MarketSite 4.1 platform, now has more than 100 suppliers with catalogues enabled.

The Woodnet approach is in contrast to another New Zealand-built site, Lignus.com, which gives subscribers an application written in Jade which can handle almost all aspects of timber trading.

Director John McVicar said Lignus has signed up most of the major New Zealand timber suppliers it was targeting, and it is now building up its channels into Asia. Lignus is built as a worldwide trading system, which uses timber industry organisations to screen potential members. He said Lignus "is very close to making money".

Meanwhile, the forest industry training organisation (ITO) has launched a new portal, www.training.org.nz, to attract new talent to the industry and offer 24-hour access to education resources. The portal was developed for Forest Industries Training by Terabyte Interactive.

The ITO this year won a 30 per cent increase, an extra $1.4 million, in funding from Skill New Zealand to boost the number of people trained for the industry.

Over the next five years the amount of wood harvested is expected to jump from 23 million cubic metres a year to 29 million cubic metres.