Welcome Benefits Tech Background

The Standard for the Timber Industry

(A Data Schema for Sawn & Planed Timber E-communication)

Benefits

The value of standardization is undeniable, as demonstrated by examples like:

A Schema is a "language" - an EDI data structure - that allows IT systems to communicate with each other. It allows you to easily transfer an order or waybill from a customer's ERP system to yours. Today, most companies use non-standard schemas, which makes IT solutions costly. This standard can reduce those costs by up to 10X.

The PROW Standard is:

Specification

Full specification download formats: Quick visual extracts for:

Waybill
Order & Confirmation
Stock Availability
Wood Definitions

Background

Do you call yourself a (somewhat) business-person?
Then this section is for you to easily understand what's a schema.

The transfer of documents (e.g., orders, invoices, stock statements) between Company X and Company Y systems without human interaction is usually called EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) or API (Application Programming Interface).

Any technical solution consists of 3 things:

  1. Channel (e.g. email, FTP, web server/HTTPS, SQL, X400, etc.)
  2. Format (e.g., Excel, CSV, XML, JSON, EDIFACT, etc.)
  3. Schema - the structure of the data e.g. prow.trade

The last one is least "visible" but the most important. Very simply put (in Excel terms) it specifies the order and names of columns in a spreadsheet. For each column, it specifies the data type (e.g., text, number, date) and, most importantly, the meaning and interpretation of the data.

Want to know a bit better what "Schema" means? Click HERE to find out!

Name origin: PROW = Professional Wood Trade (or Pine-Rowan Orb-Weaver)