With the European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) nearing implementation, forest products companies must ask whether their compliance processes can provide the evidence needed to demonstrate due diligence.
In 2026, ResourceWise hosted a four-part EUDR Readiness Briefing Series to help industry professionals track regulatory developments, address operational challenges, and assess supply chain traceability.
A key takeaway: readiness requires more than collecting supplier information. Companies must verify material origins, link them to products and shipments, and maintain defensible documentation.
Companies with existing EUDR solutions or internal processes should identify gaps before they affect compliance reporting or EU market access.
A recurring theme was the distinction between established responsible-sourcing practices and the specific evidence EUDR requires.
Forest products companies have long used certification, chain-of-custody systems, legality assessments, and supplier documentation to support sustainable sourcing. These programs offer a valuable foundation but do not, on their own, prove EUDR compliance. Companies must demonstrate that covered products meet the regulation’s deforestation-free and legality requirements, supported by due diligence information.
This means evaluating whether existing programs can provide geolocation evidence, risk assessments, and links between production areas and products sold in the EU. Companies may not need to rebuild their sustainability programs, but must ensure they provide EUDR’s specific, verifiable evidence.
Geolocation was a major operational challenge discussed in the webinars. Collecting coordinates is a starting point, but does not establish the full production area or verify accuracy.
Under EUDR, companies must provide geolocation for relevant production plots. Depending on plot size and type, this may require polygons rather than a single point. For forest-product companies with extensive supplier networks, obtaining accurate polygons can create significant administrative work—especially when suppliers have varying technical capabilities or information must be gathered across many harvest sites.
Webinar discussions emphasized moving beyond data collection to processes that:
Having geolocation data is not the same as reliably verifying it. For companies assessing EUDR readiness, existing systems may collect coordinates but lack efficient ways to validate them or use them in downstream reporting.
Unlike supply chains with products traceable to a single production site, forest products pass through multiple stages before reaching their destination. Wood may be harvested, transported to a sawmill, turned into chips or residuals, sent to a pulp mill, and made into paper or packaging. Materials from different origins may be mixed during storage, processing, and manufacturing, making it difficult to link products or shipments to their source areas.
ResourceWise experts emphasized that effective traceability must reflect how wood and fiber move through the supply chain, linking harvest origins, supplier transactions, manufacturing facilities, and finished-product shipments. Sawmill and harvest residuals are especially important: they make up a substantial share of many supply chains, but movement through intermediaries can complicate origin reporting.
EUDR traceability must reflect real production and sourcing practices, not assume a simple path from raw materials to finished products. Companies with existing compliance systems should ask: Can they track mixed fiber, residuals, and multiple sourcing locations without significant manual work?
EUDR readiness depends on supplier participation across the forest products value chain. Even companies with established compliance systems may struggle if suppliers cannot provide consistent, usable information.
ResourceWise's implementation experience shows supplier data availability improving as companies prepare and origin requests become more common. But collecting data is only part of the process: companies also need reliable ways to transmit, validate, organize, and update records.
In the third briefing, Barry Parrish, ResourceWise’s Director of Sustainability, highlighted the value of supplier communication, training, and structured project management. Based on ResourceWise’s experience, communicating requirements, training suppliers to submit data, and collecting geolocation information can take about two months.
Companies should assess not just whether they have the required data, but how efficiently they can obtain missing information and maintain complete records. Those managing extensive supplier networks should ask:
These operational factors determine whether compliance remains manageable as reporting volumes grow.
A final theme was the need to move beyond collecting compliance data and integrate it into daily operations. Accurate harvest-area data, risk assessments, and supplier records must support EUDR-regulated products and shipments by linking origin details to production and shipment records and due diligence documents.
The webinars also discussed the EU's TRACES-based EUDR Information System for submitting due diligence statements. Companies must make these reporting processes operational before commercial shipments require them, including for materials produced before the regulation applies but placed on the EU market afterward. Compliance should therefore inform inventory and shipment planning, not just production.
Overall, EUDR readiness must cover the entire workflow, from supplier data collection to final compliance documentation.
The four-part series reinforced an important distinction between having an EUDR compliance strategy from having a process that reliably supports implementation.
Companies with compliance systems should assess how they perform across real supply chains: Can geolocation be verified? Do origins remain traceable through processing and mixing? Can evidence be linked to shipments and reporting requirements?
They should also evaluate maintenance demands. Workflows reliant on manual data collection, spreadsheets, or repeated supplier requests may be hard to scale.
Rather than simply asking whether a solution exists, forest products companies should ask whether it produces accurate, defensible information efficiently and consistently.
ResourceWise developed Forest Trackt to address the specific traceability and geolocation challenges found throughout forest products supply chains.
The platform helps companies collect supplier information, generate harvest-area polygons through geospatial change detection, connect origin data to downstream products and shipments, and prepare compliance-ready reporting.
These capabilities are particularly relevant for companies managing extensive supplier networks, sawmill residuals, and complex fiber flows.
For organizations reviewing existing EUDR processes, Forest Trackt offers an opportunity to evaluate where greater automation, traceability, and data verification could strengthen readiness.