FibreOnline makes all this data available in one location, around the clock. Customers mostly use it to check up on delivery details. Quality trends and information about the properties of the pulp also interests the users.
“Some of our customers use the pulping report in the tracking sense – in other words, if they need to show which batches were fed into the pulper at a specific time of the day, they get this information from the report,” says Thomas Fant, Metsä Fibre’s Technical Customer Service Manager.
User training of updated service is underway in Asia
FibreOnline has been thoroughly updated in recent years. The service has been developed not only to be more user-friendly, but also to be more functional in terms of its visual appearance and operation.
“It was clear from the outset that FibreOnline needs to be a tool that customers want to use on a daily basis,” says Fant.
The renewal work started with an interview of a group of customers. The responses and feedback served as the basis for the planning and implementation of the changes, carried out in cooperation with Metsä Group’s ICT team and a few partners who provide the company with digital services.
To use the updated FibreOnline customers will need to sign in again and learn how to work with the new user interface. The service’s relaunch and user training began in Finland with the rest of Europe being introduced to the updated service in 2018. Training is now underway in China.
Development of performance and funtionalities continues
FibreOnline’s development work will be continued systematically over the coming years. During 2020, for example, the service will be launched in Chinese and will include a tracking feature for deliveries.
“We have a three-year roadmap according to which the development work will systematically proceed,” says Tom Nickull, VP, Sales and Development of Services at Metsä Fibre.
The roadmap also includes the further development of reporting and the speed at which reports open as well as improvement of the service’s performance.
“We also want to make FibreOnline increasingly interactive, which would allow our customer to send us their own pulp forecasts, among other things”.
More feedback from customers is welcomed
The feedback received from customers so far has been largely positive.
Customers have been particularly happy with the service’s user-friendliness and its 24/7 availability, as well as the real-time nature of the information.
The visual representation of graphs and the export of data from FibreOnline to Excel for further processing have also garnered praise.
