Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

Being a large home products retailer IKEA uses around six and a half million cubic meters of wood annually in its products. IKEA has a wide range of suppliers in many countries all around the world. In 2007 IKEA launched a project introducing GIS into the company’s wood sourcing system. The present study was conducted during the summer and autumn of 2007 in collaboration with IKEA. Its aim was to investigate issues that had arisen in the course of the GIS project in the company, such as region of origin in wood tracing, availability of forest resource data on sub-country regional level. In addition, this study is to provide an insight into the systems future usage by building a sample database and testing essential functionality of the system by the means of ArcView 9.2 GIS software.
A few examples of GIS in wood origin tracing and decision support systems in other companies were reviewed. Information on territorial divisions in place was collected for twelve countries selected for the study in order to investigate the wood origin region definition issue. The selected countries were: Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, Poland, Ukraine, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria. In the next step, availability of forest resource data at the defined sub-country regional level was assessed for the same set of countries. Finally a sample database was built including IKEA’s forest tracing system data, acquired forest resource data for a sub-set of countries and spatial data for displaying features of countries, regions and sub-regions on the map. With the sample database and the GIS software programme, ArcView 9.2, practical execution of a few principal tasks was tested.
Results revealed a pattern of multi-purpose territorial units in the countries covered by the study and possible approaches to the wood origin region definition issue. Furthermore, the results showed a limited availability of forest resource data on a sub-country regional level in the investigated countries. However, it is important to point out that the study presents just a “snap-shot” picture as of 2007. The final part allowed for identifying basic relationships in the database which were necessary for the software to execute principal data query and analysis tasks as well as allowing for obtaining a picture of the visualization capabilities of the system.
A few recommendations were given concerning wood origin region definition and the outlook of including forest resource data in the GIS system in IKEA’s wood sourcing.