Rural supply chains to produce wooden furniture in Misantla, Veracruz

Abstract

Wooden furniture manufacturing in Misantla uses long, technically unstructured artisan processes, high generation of wood waste and high turnover among its handicraftsmen. This paper describes the organization and operation of their carpentry shops and workshops. The relationships between their economic agents, the supplier-organization-final customers, including the internal and external processes as well as their productive factors that make up their supply chain were studied. This research, accomplished in 2021, was a mixed, exploratory and transactional study. 86 carpentry shops and 101 workshops were interviewed and a semi-structured survey was applied. Findings state a family wood furniture industry, with a technology designed by the carpenters, no access to technology supported by computers or the marketing strategies for a local and regional scope that favors delayed deliveries and client complaints. This family industry context requires formal administrative organization structures, training programs, and industrial integration schemes that allow access to technology and financing. It is important to organize as a single handicraft sector, a plan for reforestation and sustainable extraction management, an improvement in the supply of raw materials and materials, as well as defining marketing strategies, proposing automated processes for assembly and vertical integration to form clusters of value chain. Future research could use random sampling, enlarge the sample size, reduce the length of the survey, and include furniture stores from other regions.