Quality communication from customer to supplier is crucial for the effectiveness of a value chain. In the forest products industry, a mutual understanding of quality requirements between customer and supplier in relation to material characteristics and production conditions is important if the material is to be utilized effectively.

In the mechanical wood industry, hardwood has normally been quality graded manually. This has been a work-intensive operation and a problematic working environment. Automatic grading equipment based mainly on camera and laser technology is therefore gradually replacing the manual grading operation which relies on the human eye. The cross-cutting of sawn wood into shorter components with well-defined quality parameters is a process which needs to be automated. This makes it possible for the sawmill to redefine the quality grading process with e.g. more complex grading rules. To gain full benefits from the new technology, however, the grading process must be redefined in cooperation with the customers. There is also an expressed need for tools to communicate the quality of products produced by sawmills.

In this study, three case studies were therefore performed where the communication of requirements between sawmills and customers was studied with regard to three different components delivered from two sawmills. In one sawmill, two products were studied; one intended for a furniture producer and one for a joinery producer. In the other sawmill, the studied product was intended for a producer of solid wood panels. The idea has been to study the need for product information expressed by both the customer and supplier through the automatic grading process and to utilise this equipment for data collection and visualisation.

The requirements for a communication and data exchange tool have been derived. There is often an expressed need to measure how different raw materials affect the volume yield in a process and how different quality requirements affect the volume yield. Sharing this information between customer and supplier has been shown to yield a mutual understanding of how and why deviations occur. Visualisation possibilities are a prerequisite for a mutual understanding of quality conceptions.