Pinja receives significant order from Helsingin Energia for fuel information management system

24.3.2014 News

Pinja’s position as a market leader gets stronger

Helsingin Energia has selected Once by Pinja enterprise resource planning system as its fuel information management system. This is a major investment to Helsingin Energia, which is one of Finland’s largest energy companies. Energy supply chain management is one of Pinja’s core competences, and with this project, transactions related to the treatment of coal will also be integrated to the system. The contract will strengthen Pinja’s position as the leading ERP system supplier for fuel management.

The Once fuel information system enables real-time emission monitoring, harmonises operations, facilitates regulatory reporting and replaces several separate systems at Helsingin Energia.

“The driver for the investment was the development programme of Helsingin Energia which aims to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. In the future, the target is to burn pellets as well as other biofuels. Pinja has strong customer references in the area of receipt logistics of solid biofuels”, says group manager Lauri Hiekkanen from Helsingin Energia.

According to Hannu Lepola, business manager of Pinja, this is a significant deal to Pinja.

“The Once system can manage both coal shiploads and pellet deliveries. Emission reports can be easily created by harmonising the current systems. All data counted as emissions and the changes made to these will also be easily traceable in the future”, Lepola explains.

Because the use of pellets involves more loads to transport compared to coal, the number of transactions requiring reporting will remarkably increase. Reporting typically takes several days in a month for an energy plant. The Once system will reduce the need of unnecessary data input to several different systems. The supply chain of Helsingin Energia includes many parties who will have access to the same information system in the future.

Light industrial pellet (top), black pellet (bottom): steam-conditioned pellet (left) and torrefied pellet. Photographer: Marina Galkin-Aalto

“This will make our entire fuel process more intelligent. Up until now, we have processed all fuels separately, because the number of loads has been smaller. Now we can define all fuels and emissions in the same system. Practically, the investment was a must due to the increasing number of loads”, Lauri Hiekkanen says.

A remarkable part of Finland’s fuel loads runs through Once by Pinja system. In January 2014, approximately 38,000 truck loads were processed in the system. This is more than 40% of all of the solid fuel used for power and heat production (forest energy, by-products and peat).