An innovative new 5-year strategic plan demonstrates Forest and Wood Products Australia’s (FWPA) responsiveness and flexibility – while offering greater transparency to stakeholders. Source: Timberbiz
Essentially, the new plan moves from an operationally structured approach to one that focusses on outcomes – across the entire supply chain.
“As a requirement of our Statutory Funding Agreement with the Australian Government, Forest and Wood Products Australia Ltd (FWPA) reviews our strategic plan every year, to create a rolling 5-year planning process,” said John Simon, Chairman of FWPA.
“This new plan is a significant step forward, one that represents not only a change on paper, but one that will also affect the operations of our company.”
Mr Simon continued to explain that the new strategy was driven by significant changes in the company’s operating environment.
These included the introduction of Government matching payments for voluntary contributions, recent changes to the National Construction Code, industry funding for a WoodSolutions technical field force pilot program and a commitment from forest growers to fund a 2-year program to review research and extension structures and priorities.
“We reviewed these developments and a desire to improve stakeholder engagement and ‘ownership’ of the plan with our directors, senior staff and key stakeholders,” Mr Simon said. “During discussions it became evident that our previous, traditionally-structured plan, based around functional areas, such as research and development (R&D) and marketing, was inward looking and didn’t communicate as effectively as it could to our stakeholders, who understandably are more interested in results than how we are organised to achieve them.”
FWPA’s previous structure reflected the evolution of the company, from a statutory R&D organisation to an industry services company, in which new services were added in response to industry feedback, with each new service becoming a new program.
The new plan is a substantive repositioning of the company, based on creating stronger links between operational goals and the following five thematic-based strategic priorities – which become the new program names:
- Promoting the advantages of wood products
- Aligning products to market needs
- Assisting value chain optimisation
- Increasing resource availability and reducing risk
- Impacting decision-making and industry capability.
Each of these programs will engage the relevant functional expertise and competencies within the company (eg R&D investments, marketing, statistics and codes development) as required.
“This is not a trivial ‘repackaging’ of the organisation,” said Ric Sinclair, FWPA’s Managing Director.
“It is a major advance that will require changes to our advisory groups, accounting systems and staff accountabilities to align operations and responsibilities with the new plan.”
When asked what would be the first thing industry players and FWPA members would notice about the new strategy, Mr Sinclair replied that he hoped it would be a realisation of the breadth and depth of FWPA’s activities and how they contribute to every sector of the industry.
“From our website to our newsletters, our communications will also reflect the new structure and hopefully be more accessible and informative, providing all our stakeholders with a broader, yet more focussed picture of the benefits we bring to increasing the growth and productivity of forest and wood products in Australia.”
Copies of the new Strategic Plan and associated Annual Operating Plan can be found on the FWPA website www.fwpa.com.a u/about-us/corporate-documents.html
