Easy-to-use analytics platform brings data to Valmet's experts and customers

Initially, Valmet's Industrial Internet platform was developed using third-party commercial components, as it was all about data analysis and visualization. The amount of data is huge and new data is constantly being added. They wanted to be able to analyze data over a long period and in a holistic way, even at the factory level or for groups of factories. Data processing and analysis was to be made possible, according to access rights and in a secure manner, for a wide range of users at Valmet.

Valmet's customers' business needs on the production efficiency side include improving quality management or achieving the best quality production at an optimized cost. Energy efficiency and emission efficiency are key themes in cost optimization.

To address these needs, Valmet developed its self-service data analytics portal in collaboration with Knowit. A good team model ensured the scaling up and down of the necessary expertise at different stages of the development lifecycle.

The first version of the data analytics platform designed for time series data, IoT, and process technology has been released, enabling more and more users to easily access the data they have access to. Once the analytics portal reached a certain maturity point, it was possible to launch a self-service analytics platform.

The ease of use of the platform means that the data user does not need to be an expert in data analytics, and this has led to a wider use of the data at Valmet. It enables more fact-based decisions and supports customers in their challenges, such as starting up new plants, optimizing existing plants, or solving failure situations. Helping customers more effectively has a positive impact on the environment as a whole.

In the future, the aim is to develop more advanced analytics, such as self-learning AI and computer vision applications that are user-friendly and easily accessible to more and more people.

Making data analytics self-service and accessible to a variety of workers has required careful user experience design. Valmet and Knowit formed a joint user experience design team that was scaled up and down as needed. The design team was able to build cross-disciplinary expertise ranging from service design to user interface component design, harmonisation and standardisation, as everything in the platform was required to share a common user language.

As the cooperation has progressed, Knowit's expertise for Valmet has expanded from cloud services, software development, and data analytics to include user experience design and, for example, management consulting by Knowit Insight.

In terms of software development, Valmet's data analytics platform is currently developed by a team of 20-30 people.

"On the software development side, Knowit can bring us up-to-date expertise and know-how. Knowit employees are very serious about their professionalism, in a positive way. In other words, we get expertise that we can guarantee is on target. When building the user experience design team, it was very important for us that both application developers and service designers have a good insight into Valmet's way of thinking and analyzing data. It is also very important to understand the end user's need for data and analytics. With its combined expertise in user experience design and data visualization, Knowit has been able to help Valmet develop process data visualization", says Teemu Toivo, Director, Industrial Internet, Valmet.

Do you want to know how we can assist you?

Give us a call or send a message, and I will get in touch with you.