Company: Peverk Oy
Industry: Railway
Location: Järvenpää (Helsinki), Finland
Cobot System: Universal Robots UR12e with SmoothTool
Keeping Finland’s Railways Running For 30 Years and Counting
Peverk Oy is not a typical machine shop. Based in Järvenpää, the company designs and manufactures specialized systems that keep Finland’s railway switches working through every season, such as snow melting systems, switch turning assistance, and monitoring solutions that tell signaling systems whether a turnout has moved correctly.
Their customers are infrastructure owners, track owners, and maintenance operators across the Finnish rail network, and in the Baltics.
The company was founded by Antti Pappila’s father, who started his career as a turner at the Pasila machine shop and built up nearly six decades of railway industry experience before establishing Peverk. Antti joined five years ago and immediately started looking for ways to move things forward.
“When I joined the company, I saw that we could still improve things,” he says. “We have tried to innovate, not just our products, but also our production processes.”
With a team of around five people handling everything from CAD design and prototyping to assembly, welding, and customer delivery, Peverk is small, dynamic, and deeply hands-on.
The Challenge: Taking Production to the Next Level
“We noticed that we do a lot of similar work,” Antti explains. “And if you think about what automation can achieve, it definitely brings more muscle to what we do.”
Having identified opportunities to enhance their workflow, Antti set out to find a solution that would elevate the business and remove production bottlenecks.
One of his motivations was resilience. In a small team, one welder’s sick leave could bring welding to a standstill.
The other motivation was time. If the robot handles the repetitive runs, the team is free to develop new products, respond to customer needs, and push the business forward rather than simply maintain it.
The Answer: UR12e with SmoothTool and EWM
Peverk selected a Universal Robots UR12e cobot with the SmoothTool welding solution from Smooth Robotics, paired with an EWM welding power source. The complete system was delivered and implemented by Smooth Robotics’ Finnish partners, Oy Machine Tool Co. and ProWeld Finland.
For a company like Peverk, three things made this combination the right fit.
- Flexibility was essential. The cobot welder isn’t bolted to a fixed cell. It can be moved to where the work is, which matters in a workshop where space is limited and production setups vary. Rather than redesigning production flow around the robot, the robot adapts to the flow.
- Ease of use was non-negotiable. With a small, mixed team, some with deep welding knowledge, others more comfortable with software, the system needed to work for everyone. The approach Peverk landed on was collaborative programming: the welder brings the process knowledge, Antti or another team member handles the interface, and the finished program goes into the catalogue for anyone to run in production. No one person has to know everything.
- Space and mobility closed the deal. Peverk’s premises simply don’t have room for a traditional robot cell. The cobot’s compact footprint and the ability to move it out of the welding area when not in use made the investment physically possible in a way a conventional system wouldn’t have been.
Curious how SmoothTool could fit into your production setup?
From Delivery to Production in a Day
ProWeld Finland handled the implementation with a straightforward philosophy: deliver the system ready to use. The cobot welder was lifted from the van into Peverk’s workshop, connected to power, and work began. The first day covered the basics. By the second day, production had started with a help of new welding jigs and fixtures.
Half the Production Time. More Order Flexibility.
The results at Peverk have been tangible. Before the cobot welder, certain welding batches took two weeks to complete. Now, the same batches can be done in one week. This presents a fundamental shift in what the business can promise its customers.
“If we have needed to get products to the customer faster, the stress about whether we will succeed or not disappears,” says Antti. “With the welding robot, a certain task can be done in a week, when it used to take two weeks.”
Beyond speed, Peverk has restructured how batches work. By running larger production batches, they keep more components ready for assembly at any given time, which smooths out the entire delivery process and means customers get faster, more predictable responses to their needs.
“From the customer’s perspective, this means we are a better and more reliable supplier, even more flexible than before. I see that as perhaps the greatest value that this acquisition brings us.”
What the Welders Think
Initial skepticism from the welding team was real and understandable.
“At first, there was the thought of ‘Do we even need this?'” Antti recalls.
The answer came from experience. After a few moments where the cobot welder stepped in and saved the day by handling a demanding run without stress or physical toll, the attitudes shifted.
“The thumbs have gone up and they’ve said, ‘Antti, you were absolutely right to get a cobot.'”
The ergonomic improvement has been particularly meaningful. Large production batches used to mean doing the same physically demanding welding work for days or weeks at a stretch. Now, the cobot handles the repetitive runs while the welder can tend to other tasks, like finishing work, tacking, or simply stepping away from the welding fumes for a while.
“Even though we have masks and air purifiers, it’s always nicer to breathe in other parts of the hall than in the welding shop,” Antti says.
The cobot welder has also changed how the team works together physically. Where previously only one person could work in the welding shop at a time, it’s now possible for a manual welder to tack components while the cobot does the final welding simultaneously.
The Investment Case: Courage Pays Off Over Time
Antti is clear-eyed about the cost. A cobot investment is many times the price of a welding power source alone, and for a company Peverk’s size, that requires genuine commitment.
“It takes a certain amount of courage to make such an investment,” he acknowledges. “But in the end, when you think about it over ten years, it is not impossible. Especially if job satisfaction and productivity improve.”
A Tool Worthy of the Work
Antti’s father built Peverk on a simple principle: you need to have proper tools. Sixty years of railway industry experience, from the Pasila machine shop floor to founding a business that now exports Finnish engineering to the world, produced a company that takes quality seriously at every level.
“Maybe today, for welding, the cobot is the proper tool,” Antti says.
For Peverk, the decision wasn’t about chasing technology for its own sake. It was about equipping their people to do better work, protecting the business against future pressures, and building the kind of reliability that customers feel on the other end of every delivery.
The robot is running, batches move faster, and welders are more satisfied. Antti now spends more time developing the next product than solving production bottlenecks.
That’s what the right tool does.
The Peverk Oy implementation was delivered in partnership with Oy Machine Tool Co. and ProWeld Finland. The solution consists of a Universal Robots UR12e, SmoothTool by Smooth Robotics, and an EWM welding power source.
Learn more about Peverk Oy: peverk.fi