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Eastern Europe
December 21, 2018 www.intellinews.com I Page 20
company’s Oskol Steel Mill and Urals Steel plants. Meanwhile, oil giant Gazprom Neft has even more ambitious plans for its digital transformation as
it expects to not only benefit from cutting-edge digital technologies but also eventually become an IT leader among local companies.
One of the directions of the company's digital transformation is development of a digital platform to manage information flows and datasets, which at a later stage could be opened up to the company's partners and contractors.
Similarly to most companies in the energy exploration and supply sector, Gazprom Neft is focused on a physical product. As a result, the company heavily uses digital doubles, which allows engineers based thousands of kilometres from the oilfields to test and control operation of the equipment.
Gazprom Neft is in the process of finding applications for digital solutions across the company's entire diverse business, which includes oil exploration, extraction, processing, transportation, sales and supply.
The oil major is also focused on unification of its financial and accounting processes on the basis of digital templates, which has already resulted in annual savings of RUB70mn ($1.1mn). Further cost savings are expected from currently run programmes for streamlining accounting and switching to paperless documents.
Meanwhile, the United Engine Corporation (UEC), a major helicopter engine manufacturer controlled by the government-owned engineering corporation Rostech, is focusing its digital
transformation plans on Internet of Things (IoT) technology.
The company recently launched a scheme that could take the use of IoT in Russia's heavy industry to a new level.
"It could become one of the largest projects in Russia in the area of adopting industrial IoT, as about 700 workplaces are expected to be digitised," the company said.
IoT will be primarily applied to monitoring equipment at the company's 12 industrial sites, and the scheme is expected to raise the workload of the equipment by 20%.
In addition, UEC is working on a digital platform that would allow it to optimise processes at all of its production and R&D divisions.
But while leading Russian companies have made considerable progress in digitising, most other enterprises are still lagging behind.
"Russian businesses are moving too slowly, especially in traditional sectors," the World Bank said in a report published in October 2018. "As such, digital transformation must be enforced
in large traditional enterprises and [state owned enterprises], which would create demand for innovation in their respective ecosystems."
According to the World Bank, the focus should be on sectorial and cross-sectorial digital platforms, which grow into seamless horizontal digital ecosystems, and enable the emergence of new business models, innovation and private sector competitiveness.