SAP Startup Spotlight: Sensire

Mikko Hassinen is Sales Director Europe at Sensire and has been with the company for two years. He has over 10 years sales experience with a focus on software solutions. He currently manages Sensire’s European sales activites. In this interview, he talks about what Sensire has to offer and what’s next for the company.

What exactly does Sensire offer?

Mikko Hassinen: We offer a solution package of software, hardware and professional services customized around customer-specific processes to resolve ongoing issues and raise visibility. Our software offers task, process, and user management with a web dashboard and mobile application. The hardware consists of gateways and sensors with patented sensing technology that can record and measure conditions of warehouses, storages, or cold devices. Connected to a centralized cloud system, we offer a 24/7 monitoring and management solution for cold chain and food safety applications. Lately, we have especially been focusing on our HACCP food safety solution that we can deliver to restaurants, retailers, catering companies, and so on.

How does your solution work?

Hassinen: We provide a centralized turnkey solution for our customers. We utilize our own network infrastructure connected to global cellular networks, so we don’t need to use the customers’ existing IT. Basically, we map our customers current processes, digitalize them and integrate automation with our sensors. For example, for HACCP processes, you can use our cloud-connected mobile application as a task management tool and do automatic temperature checks of fridges and freezers with our sensors. All administration and analysis of the collected data happens via our centralized web dashboard.

What are the customer requirements?

Hassinen: We approach our customer’s requirements by interviewing and consulting on what their current issues and problems are. Usually, they are doing a lot of the work manually, they do not have visibility into what happens during transportation or what conditions exist in their storage. Consequently, customers only have a basic idea of what happens around their processes. Without comprehensive records, it’s hard to know what to improve, and the measures they take are reactive rather than proactive. Our solution allows you to be proactive. You can estimate what is going to happen, before it happens. This allows you to start improving efficiency and quality.

How could your solution potentially help customers navigate the COVID-19 pandemic and the different challenges of reopening?

Hassinen: The COVID-19 pandemic affected many processes. Customers were forced to, for example, adhere to new hygiene and cleaning guidelines. With our centralized cloud solution, it’s easy to create new tasks, templates or instructions according to current conditions. Once they are created, they automatically spread to all the mobile applications used in the company and workers immediately have updated tasks and instructions. Thus, we can lessen the impact of certain circumstances in the sense that we provide the possibility to immediately react and scale the response within customers’ processes.

How are you connected to SAP?

Hassinen: Sensire is a certified SAP partner. We offer two-way integration with SAP software. For example, if a customer is using SAP as their ERP system, Sensire’s solution can be integrated, and we can bring all of their existing tasks and measurements into our cloud. In this situation, SAP provides the basic framework and Sensire supplies the hands-on operating system you work with on a day-to-day basis. Obviously, all data gathered with our solution can be sent directly to SAP and you can use different modules, like machine learning, to work with it.

What’s next for Sensire?

Hassinen: We keep on developing solutions that are easy to access and tailored to our customers’ needs. We just opened our very own web shop, where customers can buy full solution packages for an immediate start of their HACCP food safety journey. Our research shows that a lot of food business customers know that HACCP is mandatory, but they don’t know how to start following those guidelines in their day-to-day operations. Customers are looking for HACCP plans and templates, which we can provide in the form of a fully digital solution. If they want to start automating measurements, we can implement our hardware and offer a full turnkey solution package. We see our competitive advantage in the fact that we have a good professional understanding of customers’ use cases and that we can provide full service on a subscription basis. We take care of customer installations, we take care of deployments, we do the training and provide support. Our customer’s success is our success as well.

Thank you for the interview.

Enjoyed this interview in our SAP Startup Spotlight Series? You might also like our piece on AiVidens, a startup helping companies maximize the use of their data in order to optimize their working capital.