How Telia and Ponsse are transforming forestry with data

Ponsse, one of the world’s leading manufacturers of forest machines, is on a mission to enable sustainable logging through customer-centered innovation. Telia Company’s Global IoT Connectivity solution is playing a small part in helping to achieve that goal by enabling Ponsse to connect its machines around the world, simply and securely.

Noora Komulainen, IT Specialist at Ponsse, says Telia was able to offer a proven, ready-made solution that had been widely tested, which was exactly what Ponsse needed.

“By connecting our forest machines, we have better control of, for example, the necessary maintenance to our machinery and can offer our customers sustainable, future-proof, and updatable solutions. With Telia Global IoT Connectivity, we have easier management interfaces and APIs for providing data, as well as receiving reliable connectivity in remote locations across the world,” she says. “All that, and [the fact] that we can use one single connectivity provider, enable us to run more streamlined operations. With the SIM cards we have more streamlined logistics, since we can get large batches of SIMs directly to our technology company Epec, which provides us with the connectivity modules.”

Founded in 1970, Ponsse has 2 000 employees and operates in 40 countries — but all its machines are designed and manufactured in Vieremä, Finland, at the company’s four-hectare factory. Today, Ponsse is a data native, offering a wide range of reporting and data-API services to its customers — thereby adding value to logging and forestry companies’ daily businesses and eliminating the costly effects of unplanned maintenance and other disruptions.

The machines are connected via Epec 6200 Remote Access Units equipped with Telia Global IoT Connectivity, enabling the data flows that can be used to provide a range of digital services. Ponsse works in close collaboration with customers to ensure that their needs are met.

“The value of the data that comes from connecting Ponsse’s machines via our connectivity units is undeniable,” Komulainen says. “The resulting service development solves actual customer problems. Connectivity is the enabler as it allows machine data to be transferred to the Ponsse Cloud Platform. With the data provided, our customers can also work more efficiently in the sustainability area.”

Staffan Eriksson, Senior IoT Portfolio Manager at Telia, says that IoT is no longer a niche technology, but rather a key enabling technology for the digitalization of the world.

“We are now entering a new era, where companies are being transformed by the data they can gather and the values that they can create from that data. They become data natives,” he says. “We have seen previously that global companies are facing a fragmented landscape of technologies, multiple operators, and increased security demands. With Telia Global IoT Connectivity, we can now remove those challenges.”