Strategic technology decision-making in Swedish large-scale forestry

Sammanfattning: Technological development gives Swedish forest companies and forest owners’associations opportunities to maintain competitiveness in the highly cost-sensitivemarket for forest products. Development efforts are typically performed throughunstructured decision processes. However, an organization’s success is a product ofits decisions, so the quality of these decisions is crucial. The main objectives of thisthesis were therefore to describe and critically analyze strategic decision-makingabout forest technology. Study I investigated how and with what support forestcompanies and a forest owners’ association make decisions about forest technology.It was concluded that these organizations value collaborations with manufacturersand researchers, that economic criteria were most important in the decision-makingprocess, and that large risks are preferably managed in a stepwise fashion. Study IIreviewed the use of Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis (MCDA) methods in forestoperations and it was shown that the methods were used at various temporal scales,most commonly when making strategic decisions. Study III developed andcompared two modelling approaches for machine system analysis and concludedthat they produced similar results despite having different levels of detail anddemanding different competences. Study IV used the previously developedmodelling approaches to compare the performance of established and new machinesystems in Swedish final fellings, revealing an opportunity to reduce costs byadopting the new machine system. A conceptual flowchart for strategic decisionmakingon forest technology development was created to improve the quality andefficiency of the decision-making process.