Funded by the European Commission under the FAIR programme, the PROMOTE project involved the participation of twelve commercial and research organisations from Austria, Finland, Germany, Sweden and the United Kingdom and ran from the 1st of January 1997 to the 31st December 1999.

The basic aim of the  project was to develop and enhance the efficiency of timber production and timber trade in Europe.  This was to be achieved by jointly introducing new information and processing technology on a broad scale throughout the wood supply chain, and by incorporating successful features from one country in the development of the industry in another.  The project concentrated on the supply of sawlogs and sawn timber as opposed to small roundwood as these are the main products produced in terms of volume, and have the greatest economic value to the forest industry.
 
Over the three year period, the work was divided into three phases and 6 tasks:
 
Phase one
Description of the existing and possible future marketing systems and existing major production systems in the participating countries (Tasks 1 & 2).
 
Phase two
Practical development work and trials of new or modified systems in co-operation with industrial companies (Task 3).
 
Phase three
Building of production chain models (Task 4), integrated analysis of the development work (Task 5) and specification of implementation needs and potentials (Task 6).
 
Details of the methods employed, the development work undertaken and the  results obtained are available from the respective participants in each of the four countries.  However, a more general summary is available in the form of the "PROMOTE Final Consolidated Report" which may be downloaded in Adobe Portable Document Format  by "Clicking" on the image below (Available from October 2001 onwards )