Blogs
07 August 2025
Reading Time: 5 mins
Eseye
IoT Hardware and Connectivity Specialists
LinkedInWhen people think of Volvo, they usually think of cars. But the Volvo Group left car manufacturing behind years ago. Today, it’s a global industrial powerhouse in trucks, construction equipment, and marine engines. And it’s on a mission to connect hundreds of millions of assets with IoT.
That’s not a typo. As Julien Bertolini, IoT Expert at Volvo Group, explained on the IoT Leaders Podcast, the company’s vision is massive in both scope and ambition.
“If it exists, we’ll track it,” Julien said. “It’s massive IoT.”
But as he also shared, they didn’t start with scale — they started from scratch.
In 2018, there were zero industrial IoT solutions in production across Volvo’s 140 factories. What followed is a powerful case study in how to overcome the barriers of complexity, silos, and fragmentation to build a future-ready, AI-powered IoT infrastructure.
From 60+ POCs to one unified strategy
When Julien joined Volvo in 2018, the company already had a strong team managing connected more than 1 million trucks on the road. But inside the factories, the situation was very different.
“I went all over the factories all over the world, and I’ve seen more than 60 IoT initiatives at this time. But there was no solution in production.”
Volvo, like many enterprises, was stuck in proof of concept (POC) hell with dozens of local initiatives with no industrialized outcomes. Julien identified three core blockers:
- Technical: Too many platforms. Every new project had to repeat security and integration reviews from scratch.
- Organizational: IT and OT teams weren’t collaborating. Silos blocked scale.
- Competence: No central IoT team to support factories or develop reusable capabilities.
So, he got to work.
“In 2019, I appointed an IoT platform for the group, so everyone was on the same system. We also built the Volvo IoT community. Anyone can be a member: shop floor, IT, legal, marketing. And we formed a dedicated IoT team.”
That foundation unlocked the transformation to come.
Citizen developers: IoT for everyone
A standout strategy in Volvo’s success is the empowerment of local teams. Julien’s team doesn’t try to own every initiative. Instead, they support, guide, and enable citizen developers across the business.
“Our strategy for the IoT team is to develop the major IoT solutions but also to support the local team across the organization so they can develop their own IoT solutions. We call that citizen development.”
This hybrid model — central architecture, local ownership — ensures both speed and consistency.
It’s the difference between IoT innovation being a bottleneck versus a multiplier. When factory teams and frontline staff can build solutions themselves, with the right tools and guardrails, momentum takes off.
Real-world use cases: from lost trucks to predictive maintenance
Julien shared several use cases already deployed across Volvo’s global operations.
AGV predictive maintenance
“I asked a maintenance guy, ‘What’s your worst recurring issue?’ He said battery failure on the AGVs. They’re 1.7 tons — it takes two people to push one. And it happens more than once a week.”
His team monitored voltage data and discovered failures consistently occurred when levels dropped below 23 volts.
“We built a system to alert maintenance teams before it drops too far. Now they have 45 minutes to act before failure. It’s super simple predictive maintenance — and it saves a lot of money.”
Finding lost trucks
“It sounds crazy, but sometimes we can’t find our trucks.”
At the end of the production line, trucks are moved around massive factory yards, sometimes six times. If a position is mis recorded, it could take two workers two hours to locate a truck.
Now, Volvo uses smart GPS trackers scanned at the assembly line to monitor truck location in real time.
“All our truck factories and construction equipment plants now use this. Thousands of products, all tracked.”
Massive asset tracking
The next phase? 30 million packaging assets tracked with a technology-agnostic platform.
“We’re starting with 160,000 special packaging units. Eventually, we want to track forklifts, tools, ports — everything. If it moves, we track it.”
It’s a textbook example of how to build from minimal viable products (MVP) to industrial scale:
“We don’t do POCs. We do MVPs — viable, scalable from the start. We bring in legal, purchasing, and the business early, so we don’t get blocked later.”
AI only works if your IoT works
Volvo isn’t just collecting data.
It’s feeding that IoT data into AI models for predictive analytics, quality control, and decision support. But Julien was clear:
“You can use AI, but only if you have good IoT solutions. The goal of IoT is to get quality data. That’s the foundation to build an AI model.”
The team has learned this the hard way.
“In logistics, we didn’t have good stock numbers. We tried to put AI on top, but the results were not good. If you don’t have quality data, you’ll not get anything from AI.”
Edge AI is another key frontier:
“For quality control on the production line, we use computer vision at the edge. If something’s wrong, AI flags it — but an operator makes the call. You need the human and the machine together.”
Connectivity: the silent enabler
Behind every one of these success stories is rock-solid connectivity. And in factories, that’s not always easy.
Volvo uses a mix of wired protocols, LoRa, BLE-to-cellular gateways, and industrial gateways to talk to machines that range from 30-year-old PLCs to brand-new robots.
Wi-Fi? Off the table.
“Wi-Fi is challenging in factories. If too many devices use it, there’s interference and saturation. So, we avoid it.”
Volvo’s tracking projects span internal logistics, factory yards, and global shipments — requiring connectivity that’s resilient, vendor-agnostic, and technology-neutral.
At Eseye, this is exactly where we help customers succeed. Our award-winning AnyNet+ eSIM combined with our Infinity IoT Connectivity Platform™ work together to deliver intelligent, global, multi-network connectivity — a must in industrial environments where availability and compliance are non-negotiable.
“We’re building a big tracking platform that’s vendor-agnostic and technology-agnostic. We can plug in any kind of tracker — that’s how we solve so many use cases.” – Julien Bertolini.
Final thoughts: scaling smart to win with AI
Volvo’s journey from zero to connecting hundreds of millions of assets across 140 factories worldwide is no accident.
It’s the result of:
- Standardizing architecture
- Empowering citizen developers
- Focusing on data quality
- Building a multi-RAT connectivity stack
The key takeaway?
“IoT deployment and connectivity of as many things as possible is essential to get the maximum benefit out of AI in the future.” – Nick Earle
AI doesn’t work without trusted, real-time data — and real-time data doesn’t exist without IoT.
At Eseye, we help enterprises turn that insight into infrastructure.
Because the winners in this new era won’t be the ones running flashy pilots.
The winners will be the ones scaling IoT with purpose, clarity, and speed.
Eseye
IoT Hardware and Connectivity Specialists
LinkedInEseye brings decades of end-to-end expertise to integrate and optimise IoT connectivity delivering near 100% uptime. From idea to implementation and beyond, we deliver lasting value from IoT. Nobody does IoT better.
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