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Tracelite
Helveta, in partnership with TFT, began developing the TracElite – Always On™ wood origin verification system in May 2003.
Third party auditors in South East Asia had failed to verify adequately whether legal and FSC wood had been used in furniture manufactured for TFT members. The auditors had relied on traditional paper based Chain of Custody (COC) systems and our field experience in factories in South East Asia had shown us that these were easily manipulated. Third party auditors will often pick up non compliances but even FSC systems do not necessarily require accurate tracking of what wood is and is not used, and the problems are typically picked up after the event.
The real problem is that an unscrupulous and creative supplier who really wants to cheat the system can do so, for some time at least, before being detected. Auditors are therefore being asked to check systems that are inherently fallible. Their contractual relationships usually mean that they aren’t paid enough to be in factories often enough and, most critically, during the production phase, to really check what is happening.
The TFT realized that relying on these paper based systems exposes our members to serious risk – their products might contain illegal wood or they may indeed be falsely labeled with the FSC logo. We needed something better. We needed a system that was able to check constantly what wood was going into each product in real time - before and during production. Once a container is shipped, it’s too late to recall it if, six months later, your auditor finds that it contained illegal wood.
The new system had to be cost effective, robust and the most transparent wood origin verification system ever built. TracElite – Always On™ is the result of this labour.
Helveta and TFT’s South East Asian field staff worked together to build TracElite. It’s a timber tracking system that delivers full traceability; automated COC and Wood Origin Control (WOC) monitoring; and remote audit, verification and reporting via the internet.
TracElite provides the ultimate in transparency for global timber industry buyers seeking timber of verifiable origin.
During the first half of 2005, we field tested the system in one of our Indonesian (East Kalimantan) partner forest projects. Logs are tracked from stump to log landing and onto the log pond where they are loaded onto a barge for sale to another TFT member, PT Tanjung Timberindo Industries based in Medan, Sumatra.
Once the logs reach Medan, they are scanned, data is uploaded via the internet and their attributes are checked against the base data set to ensure all is in order. When a potential non-compliance is identified, TracElite staff, stakeholders and auditors are automatically notified via email.
The key to TracElite functionality is that once notified, staff can act immediately to identify whether there are issues. If issues are identified, they can be remedied quickly and most critically BEFORE products containing wood of unknown origin are manufactured, packaged and shipped.
The in-factory part of the system enables companies to keep track of wood origin in their products from the stump to the port of final product shipment and on to their own warehouses or retail outlets.
TracElite is designed to work in-forest, in-factory and in the most remote and challenging environments on Earth. It uses proven, robust technologies to provide a traceability system which is quick to deploy, inexpensive, reliable and easy to use.
TracElite allows:
- Effective, near real-time COC and WOC through flexible data capture that tracks timber movement between forest, sawmill and factory and on to end-users
- Flexible configuration for use in any context – temperate, boreal or tropical – and for any wood sector – logs, timber, furniture, plywood, mouldings, doors etc
