Stora Enso, headquartered in Finland, is the renewable materials company with a revenue of about US$ 10 billion. The oldest preserved share certificate in the world dates back to the year 1288 and is of Stora Enso. This makes it, probably, the oldest limited liability company in the world. What can a company like this have to teach us about analytics? Plenty, if you listen to Marko Yli-Pietilä. In this episode, Marko talks about using analytics for smarter manufacturing. Where do product ideas come from? How do you develop a pipeline of successful use cases? And what do failures mean? Listen for very generalisable insights from a very unique setting.

Marko Yli-Pietilä, Finland

Marko Yli-Pietilä is an experienced Digital Transformation professional. As Head of Smart Operations at Stora Enso, he works on digitalising operations to improve operational efficiency. Prior to joining Stora Enso, Marko has held international positions at Nokia and Teradata. He has also worked with renewable materials companies and their digitalisation related development programs for years as a management consultant. Marko holds a Licentiate of Technology postgraduate degree and he is also a certified vocational teacher.

Highlights:

[00:02:00] We utilize modern technologies in a sensible way to improve our operations efficiency. OEE, overall equipment efficiency is the most important KPI set we use to measure success in industrial digitalization.

[00:10:00] We have nearly 40 solutions in smart operations that are operational at least in one mill. And roughly 20 of those…we are scaling out to multiple mills even globally.

[00:15:00] We can predict 10 to 12 hours into the future how the quality variations will be.

[00:26:00] There are so many ways you can utilize modern methodologies to find a solution. There's not one or 10 or even 100, there might be like thousands of different alternative ways to come to the right solution.

[00:36:00] No matter how good a solution you have in your hands, if the end-users are not happy to use those tools, the value will be zero or even negative.

[00:38:00] One approach doesn't fit all. You need to be ready to listen, to adapt, customize at all levels: solutions, your methods… all that you need in order to take industrial digital forward.

[00:40:00] If you're not having these sorts of cases [failures], then you're doing something wrong. You're not kind of challenging yourself enough. You're not doing, let's say, crazy enough things if you always succeed.

[00:40:00] It is iterative and sometimes you take one step back, but after that you might take three steps forward.

Resources:

https://www.storaenso.com/en Stora Enso website

https://seeds.storaenso.com/ The Stora Enso Expanded Design System

https://hyperight.com/dair-awards-2021/ The DAIR awards