Eyeing the market for imported furnishings, which has been valued at US$74 million (J$6.6 billion), the Bureau of Standards Jamaica (BSJ) on Wednesday unveiled its Furniture and Wooden Products Incubator Project (JWPIP) to address the critical issue of quality and quantity produced domestically.
Jamaica's furniture makers, mostly small players, have struggled to build capacity, and have consistently been unable to grow production to meet demand.
So much of the furniture used by hotel properties and sold by retailers is imported.
guiding the sector
Prime Minister Bruce Golding and the Ministry of Industry and Commerce are said to want to change that, and have co-opted the Bureau of Standards to a project to guide the sector.
"We should not only be looking at products to test them to death, but also to determine standards from the point of design and creation so that we can successfully compete with imports," said the bureau's senior technical director, Gladstone Rose.
"Our raw materials for wood products are the same price as that used abroad. By applying standards, we can match imported products. If we could just get one-quarter of the US$74 million market for imported furnishings, that would represent an awful lot of jobs."
The incubator, which includes a design centre, has been located at Portmore HEART Trust/NTA academy in St Catherine to train and retrain furniture manufacturers.
The JWPIP will function as the hub for furniture makers nation-wide willing to participate in the programme.
The BSJ has set aside J$25 million for the project, which will include training for furniture manufacturers and the creation of centres of design and production in which manufacturers are expected to forge partnerships with each other to handle large contracts.
Noel Osborne, executive director of the BSJ, said that, as conditions currently stand, if 10 different manufacturers were asked to produce an item, the output for each would be different.
The programme is configured to address those anomalies through standardisation and design assistance under what the bureau describes as "a hub-and-spokes systems".
Qualified hub members will be expected to have space in their workshops to facilitate other manufacturers, trained personnel to train others, and signed contracts valued at more than US$3 million.
Locally, the wood-products industry is made up of specialists in joinery, school furnishings, giftware and decorative accessories, kitchen and bathroom furniture, furniture repair, as well as general furnishing and upholstering.
'hub-and-spokes' formula
Owen Reeves, president of the Jamaica Wood Products and Furniture Association (JAFWA), is sold on the hub-and-spokes formula, saying Wednesday that it would result in higher levels of production.
The system encourages participants, he said, to outsource some of the work to places where trained workers could complete them quickly, instead of individual manufacturers attempting to produce items from start to finish in their own shops.
The incubator will also focus on the business side of the operation, offering advice on standards and design, as well as training in accounts, business planning, computer skills, business registration, and access to loans.
According to Dr Rosalea Hamilton, who is set to head the JWPIP, business support services, 93 per cent of small and medium-size entities have no business training at all.
BSJ project manager Richard Lawrence says the agency is now collecting data on the furniture industry, out of which it will determine the level of interest in the incubator programme and, from there, the level of resources needed for the project.
The bureau says out of the JWPIP, it hopes to produce "a constant supply of innovative yet standardised designs and prototypes which will ensure durability, quality and consistency in the supply of furniture and wooden products needed in the marketplace".
avia.collinder@gleanerjm.com