Like in any other sector, forestry business is also disrupted by digitalization. Digitalization is proceeding apace in forestry through digital solution in managing inventory, enabling optimization, facilitating operation, cost savings and risk assessment. These digital solutions are also helpful in to store and utilize the vast data recorded in the forest business. So enters, Wuudis Solutions a Finland based company in forest digitalization offering agile and easy to use IT solutions for forest and bio-based businesses.
Wuudis is an ecosystem of digital forest management and monitoring services which include apps, portal solutions and processed forest big data for improved decision making. It has the vision to grow as one of the global ICT leaders providing digital forest management services and real-time monitoring of wood and bio-materials supplies. The two services of Wuudis Solutions are Wuudis Business and Wuudis Bioenergy which turn digitalization of forest management and bio business into a single value chain solution. These services are mobilizing the operations of forest management and bio business field work throughout the full cycle. It creates easy networking, data sharing and access to forest inventory data and increases business’s profitability. With these solution, forest owners or their authorized service providers (e.g: contractors, associations and forest companies) can create and update forest management plans and thus get real-time forest resource information. This information is used to optimize logging and silviculture operations and more actively exploit and manage their forests and boost bio economy by bringing more fibre to the market.
A Visionary Chief
Seppo Huurinainen, the Founder & CEO of Wuudis Solutions, has a cumulative experience of 35 years in forestry, entrepreneurship, and information technology. He holds a broad academic experience in GIS, IT, and silviculture with five university level degrees. Mr. Huurinainen, was having problem with managing his more than 1000 hectare of forest property in an easy and profitable way. Therefore, he established Wuudis Solutions Oy (previously MHG Systems Oy) to kill his problems and revolutionize the forest and wood supply chain business through digital services. According to Mr. Huurinainen, his forest property works as a ‘sandbox’ to test Wuudis ICT services by maintaining quality checks at every point of software development.
Achieving Success with Big Partners
Wuudis Solution delivers IT solutions to big forest corporation on project-based software development followed by SaaS fees (billed annually) for updates and maintenance. Forestry big corporations and forestry authorities want to own the IT system therefore they prefer project-based model. So, Wuudis develops services based on the needs of customers and then delivers the service within the agreed timeline. In this context one of the company’s big clients is Metsäkeskus (Finnish forest centre). Now Metsäkeskus is on a mission to digitalize every single hectare of “Finnish forest by 2020” and Wuudis solutions Oy will support Metsäkeskus in achieving that mission.
Innovation is the Strength
Development and commercialization of an innovative solution which is disruptive in nature is not easy and requires lot of personal motivation and patience. One of the most important things is to continuously motivate the team and keep product and business development rolling even in constrained circumstances. At Wuudis Solutions Oy, the focus is on developing visionary services. Sometimes there are problems with some prospective clients, who are little hesitant to implement services as they have to adopt new and improved operational practices by throwing conservative methods. Wuudis Solutions understood that innovation is the greatest strength to become competitive in today’s market.
According to the company “we realize innovations via our participation in the EU research projects, where EU wide best stakeholders from the sector are collaborating with each other to develop the most innovative and useful services/products.” Wuudis has the capability to deliver several benefits to the whole forest ecosystem. It enables maximized revenues and profits for forest owners from improved forest management. And guidance for planning next forest activities that needs to be performed to exploit maximum economic benefit from timber harvest. These services save costs and increased margin for forest service companies via easy scouting and connection with forest owners and deliver superior customer service through use of easy apps and web based tools.
Vision to Formulate New Services
The future of forestry is accelerating towards better CO 2 fixation and dynamic forest management and monitoring. To cope up with the new needs of the sector, Wuudis Solutions Oy is in the process of creating breakthrough innovation by offering tree wise dynamic forest inventory and forest health monitoring services utilizing Sentinel-2 and VHR data. To speed up this development, the company has joined forces with Belgium based space and software company Spacebel. Spacebel has around 30 years of experience in space and software business. This new solution will break the conservative paradigm of paperbased forest management plans by offering digital and standardized forest management plans and necessary data to run daily operations on Wuudis service. Based on this innovation, the mission is to disrupt global forest business by offering services worldwide.
Testimonials
“I have used the Wuudis service as forest owner and also presented its features to other forest owners. Within Wuudis service, editing pattern information and boundaries, sharing plot level information, and utilizing a diverse map and spatial data features provide new opportunities for selfmanaged forest management. These Wuudis features are extremely useful for my own forest management and my customer forests asset that I am managing in daily business.” Kalle Karttunen, Owner of Karttuva
“Wuudis Solutions developed Laatumetsä crowd sourcing app for Finnish Forest Centre. This app is the first of its kind globally, which controls forest care works quality for subsidy payment and acts as app for forest damage data collection. The users of Laatumetsä such as forest owners and contractors found the app extremely useful as the subsidy payment goes on mobile by drastically reducing the payment processing time and paper works. Moreover, the app drives forest stakeholders towards sustainable forest management.” Jorma Jyrkilä, Forest data service manager of Finnish Forest Centre
