Seppo Huurinainen: Fighting the societal problems like climate change and biodiversity loss with Wuudis Solutions

Having a passion for serving mother nature, Seppo Huurinainen, CEO of Wuudis Solutions, is addressing the climate change problem through sustainable management of forests. Creating societal and environmental positive change with the modern digital solutions, he is leading the way to create win-win results for everyone.

Journey to success

Since childhood, Seppo has been fascinated with mother nature. Before marking the dawn of the company, he held different development and research positions within the forest and agriculture industry and worked for organizations such as the Finnish Forest and Park Service, Metla, Finnish Forest Centre, Metsäliitto, Stora Enso, and the National Board of Education. His international career has included long-term project tasks in Indonesia and Mozambique.

While progressing forward in the career, he realized that there was a need for an IT solution to handle the forest property data and its operations in a digital way. This problem sparked an idea in his mind, and he marked the advent of Wuudis Solutions for dynamic forest management and monitoring.

Wuudis Solutions grew the team with like-minded credible people to revolutionize the forest and related natural resource business through digital services.

Tackling the challenges along the way

Developing and commercializing an innovative solution that is disruptive in nature is not easy and requires a lot of personal motivation and patience. One of the most important things is continuously motivating the team and keeping product and business development rolling even in constrained circumstances.

Seppo adds, “At Wuudis Solutions Oy, we are developing visionary services, so sometimes we face problems with some prospective clients, who are a little hesitant to implement our services as they have to adopt new and improved operational practices by throwing conservative methods.”

Helping customers run their business more productively and sustainably with Wuudis Solutions

Wuudis is a digital ecosystem solution for Forestry and related natural resource assets for management and monitoring purposes, providing up-to-date forest resource data and enabling seamless data sharing in real-time between all business actors in the value chain. The company serves different entities involved in the forest industry.

Forest and natural resource asset owners: Wuudis enables easy and remote property management and guides them in planning the next forest activities needed to get maximum economic benefit from the harvest.

Forest industry: Wuudis saves costs by providing specific reports and Data (based on the fusion of multiple data sources like satellite, field data, drone data, etc.), which drives their business towards efficiency.

Forest authority: Wuudis provides custom apps and services to digitize their daily operations. These apps and services are integrated with forestry big data sources like very high resolution satellite data, UAV data, field verification data, etc., which opens further opportunities to develop a one-stop platform to run their business.

Service providers or contractors: Wuudis provides digital tools to manage natural resource assets on behalf of their customers (asset owners). The experts of service companies run their daily activities over Wuudis and also send reports to customers using features of Wuudis’s digital platform.

Society: Wuudis adds societal and environmental value via the promotion of sustainable natural resource management practices and increased mobilization of available resources for the needs of the industry.

Revamping the industry with innovative solutions

The forestry industry is facing a transition due to advancements in Big-data and AI technologies. Wuudis has embraced the value of Big-data & AI with open arms.

As a part of the ICT4Forest project funded by the European Space Agency, Wuudis integrates with multiple big-data sources like satellite data (Sentinel-2 and VHR), field data, and other open data sources to run forest and related natural resource business as a one-stop platform solution.

Seppo expresses, “Other service providers in the forestry IT domain can bring their services into our platform and generate income. Through the Wuudis platform, we will revolutionize the way how Forestry business works today as every stakeholder able to generate income from the ecosystem, and a win-win situation will be created for everyone in the business value-chain.”

Fighting the pandemic with smart solutions

In the fight against the pandemic, it is high time to re-think our societal problems in order to adapt in a better way for the future.

Seppo adds, “We know that climate change and biodiversity loss are major societal problems, but they can be addressed through sustainable Forest management and monitoring.”

However, in the current state, static information and lack of updated forest resource data are two hurdles that are causing a lot of problems. Moreover, visits to remote sites are expensive and time-consuming to verify the actual conditions of the forests.

With the European Space agency Copernicus program, there is ample satellite data available, but there is a need for a usable IT solution that makes it available to forest and related natural resources industry end-users. This is where Wuudis Solutions comes to the rescue.

Seppo expresses, “Wuudis platform services are covering these needs to drive dynamic Forest management and monitoring. Additionally, Wuudis platform services help users to reduce their site visits as all updated forest resource data are available over the smartphone. This has been a major painkiller to many of our customers during the pandemic.”

Life as the CEO of the company

Wearing the hat of the CEO of the company, Seppo is responsible for the overall operations. This includes driving business development, financial management, customer relationship, investor relationship, team coordination, etc.

Being an early bird, he handles the administrative and financial matters in the morning and then indulges in meetings for the rest of the day. He also makes time for further planning and plotting of strategy to expand the company. He ends the day with a meeting with the business development team, planning the next course of action.

Achieving work-life balance

Usually, in Nordic countries, the companies follow a very good work-life balance model. So, this is also the case with Wuudis Solutions Oy.

While fueling the growth of the company, he makes ample time for his family and his personal hobbies like gardening, berry picking, beer brewing, winemaking, etc.

Future plans of Wuudis Solutions

Currently, Wuudis is in a growth phase for international markets. The solutions of Wuudis have been well accepted in the domestic market and got traction in the international market.

Seppo states, “Our strategy is to run several pilots with interested international customers, where they gain access to state-of-the-art digital integrated solutions, data-driven services, and reports to improve their business towards efficiency and cost savings at a discounted price. Hence, we invite interested companies and organizations globally to contact us if they aim to go for digitalization in the near future.”