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Jartek is a 70-year-old Finnish family-owned company whose machines and production lines serve the wood industry around the world. Its most recent deliveries have gone to Sweden and Japan, for example, and its customers reach as far as North America and New Zealand. Alongside its long mechanical engineering heritage, Jartek is increasingly developing digital solutions, data-based services and software that help customers make their production more efficient, improve quality and use process data more effectively than before.

Data utilisation starts from the foundations

Production lines generate a significant amount of data every day, but using it has typically required manual, customer-specific work. Jartek wanted to improve the usability of this data so that it would serve the customer's own production directly.

This called for a modern data platform. Together with Veracell, Jartek built a centralised, cloud-based data platform that brings the production data generated at customer sites into a ready-to-use whole. Veracell brings deep technical expertise in data platforms and AI to the partnership, and Jartek brings in-depth understanding of sawmill production environments and their specific characteristics. The goal was never a tailored solution for a single sawmill, but a repeatable model that serves Jartek's global customer base as part of the Jartek Digital Services offering.

A data platform built together

The collaboration started with one active customer. This made it possible to validate quickly and deliver concrete value at an early stage. The first use case was a daily-updating capacity monitoring solution built with Power BI. The solution was put into use already during the development phase and was developed further in an agile way based on direct customer feedback.

Veracell was responsible for the implementation from end to end: customer-specific integrations, automated data pipelines and analytics-ready data models. Production data moves from customer-local environments to the data platform, where it is unified and refined to serve multiple downstream use cases.

The solution is built on a modern cloud architecture designed to be scalable and easy to maintain. The modular structure supports data quality and allows new customer environments to be brought on board smoothly. The same model applies whether the sawmill is in Finland, Sweden or Japan.

"At times Teams messages went back and forth daily, so questions got fast answers and the development moved forward well. The sawmill industry wasn't familiar to me before, so Jartek's industry expertise was essential. Through smooth collaboration, we could make sure the solution fits exactly into how sawmills actually run." – Laura Uskola, Data Engineer, Veracell

Small steps, meaningful results

On a modern sawmill, even a one-percentage-point improvement in utilisation is a big leap, and the impact on revenue can be several thousand euros a year. So this is genuinely worth investing in.

Once production data is in one place, comparable and easy to use, new solutions can be built on top of it step by step: improving production control, customer-specific optimisation and, going forward, AI-driven use cases as well.

Jartek's goal is that data-driven services become part of everyday work across the entire customer base, not just remain at pilot stage. The platform now built provides a natural foundation for this and ties into the expanding JartekDigital Services offering.

"It has been great to develop the solution directly with end users. This way, a solution first built as a pilot could be refined all the way into a product on a fast schedule. A particular strength of the platform is the seamless pipeline from the production equipment systems all the way to the data platform. We are excited about the possibilities this opens up for all kinds of new applications that weren't possible before." – Heikki Laaki, CTO, Jartek