Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works (MMK) has automated 407 business processes in the past few years, generating cumulative savings of more than RUB 1.8 billion from the implementation of robotic process automation (RPA). The head of MMK's Economics Department, Evgeny Tarabaev, presented these results during the 7th RPA conference "Next Connect: People. Processes. Robots", which took place in Magnitogorsk.
"Digitalisation has reached every functional area of the Company. Over the past five years, we have invested RUB 4.8 billion in digital technologies. More than 170 digital initiatives have been developed and over 100 projects implemented, generating savings of RUB 6.8 billion. Factoring in RPA-robotic process automation, which continues to expand across MMK-the total economic benefit amounts to RUB 8.6 billion. We use every available technology, but the greatest benefits come from advanced analytics and optimisation planning technologies," Mr Tarabaev said.
As one example, he highlighted the implementation of the Optimal Pig Iron automated information system, which has generated savings of around RUB 1.8 billion by enabling MMK to produce pig iron of the required quality at the lowest possible cost. Another large-scale initiative is MMK's optimisation planning system, which has delivered an economic benefit of RUB 1.4 billion.
"The system manages 6,000 production flows that produce thousands of finished product SKUs. And everything is optimised using the 'margin per hour' metric. Doing this manually would be virtually impossible," Mr Tarabayev noted.
According to him, RPA delivers benefits comparable to those of major digitalisation projects: with costs remaining relatively stable, the economic benefit continues to accumulate as each new software robot is deployed. Today, software robotics has become a strategic investment for MMK. Moreover, RPA is no longer treated as a standalone technology but is integrated with process analytics technologies-Process Mining and Task Mining-which operate within a single management framework along with RPA. Combining these technologies creates a significant synergistic effect.
The 7th RPA conference "Next Connect: People. Processes. Robots" brought together experts from IT, metallurgy and other industries to discuss robotic process automation, successful artificial intelligence applications, and Process and Task Mining technologies (business process and task analytics). The conference was organised by Next Robotics in collaboration with MMK and MMK-Informservice, with support from partners Primo RPA, VK Tech and UC GIS.