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Eastern Europe
December 21, 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 19
“The World Bank welcomes the government’s commitment to these historic reforms to bolster economic growth, safeguard fiscal sustainability, and improve the effectiveness of social services,”
Russia’s major corporates undergoing a digital transformation
bne IntelliNews
Everyone is on board. Digitisation has been made a top priority of the government that has already transformed the tax service so that a cosmonaut paid his taxes from space last year. Companies are putting their businesses online and retail has gone into the cloud so fast that footfall in Russia’s leading malls is already visibly falling each year. And Russians love their gadgets to the point where even babushkas have been seen paying for groceries using an e-wallet on a smart phone.
The state-owned retail banking giant Sberbank is probably the best known example of Russian companies that have thrown themselves into using technology to boost their business, but a lot of more dour industries, like metallurgy, have joined the train recently.
Metalloinvest, one of Russia’s leading steel
and mining companies, has been pursuing a digitisation strategy since 2016, dubbing the programme Industry 4.0. The scheme is focused on standardising the company's processes and stepping up flexibility and speed in reacting to internal and external challenges.
"The world is changing enormously fast," Yuri Gavrilov, the company's director for strategy,
said Cyril Muller, World Bank vice president for Europe and Central Asia. “These reforms aim to create greater opportunities and improve living standards for the people of Ukraine.”
Sberbank's CEO German Gref has embraced the digital revolution in Russia
development and transformation, told Vedomosti. "We need to adapt, and to adapt quickly. However, speed is achievable only when the company is manageable and processes can be adjusted with lightning speed.
"To achieve that, we need, among other things, to change the principles of interaction between our employees and modes of collaboration with suppliers, and customers," he added.
Using SAP S/4HANA as the digital core of its platform, Metalloinvest originally applied new solutions at Lebedinsky and Mikhailovsky mining and processing enterprises before scaling them to the entire company. As a result, the time required for bureaucratic procedures was reduced by about a quarter.
Within the framework of the overall scheme, several initiatives are being implemented, including those focused on switching to e-documentation and maintaining information security.
The company aims to complete its digital switch by mid-2019, when the rollout of the digital solution is expected to be completed at the