Charlie Park (BIE ‘20) works as a supply chain planner for Canfor, one of the leading lumber and pulp companies in British Columbia.
Park’s role involves numerous tasks, including monitoring and managing global inventories, forecasting sales and productions at the mill, and communicating with the transportation teams to ensure all the shipments are being delivered efficiently throughout Western Canada.
“There’s a limit on how much you can produce, so you have to be very careful of how you’re going to allocate the production to different warehouses,” he said. “The demand has also increased now because clients use pulp to create paper and tissues, and the need for that has gone up since the pandemic started.”
So too has the demand for lumber as more and more people stay busy with home renovation projects. Park says it’s made him busier than ever before.
One of Park’s biggest challenges is the forecasting.
“Since the mills don’t produce similar amounts of pulp every day, forecasting production and the quality is always a little stressful,” he said. “But having an economics degree has helped me a lot.”
Looking back at his time at the BIE, Charlie’s favourite class was on correlation and causation.
“I loved adding a bunch of variables and seeing the output, what some of the similarities were within those variables, amongst other things, was a lot of fun,” he said.
