Specialists from the Centre for RPA Expertise and Innovation of MMK-Informservice (part of MMK Group) are working on implementing RPA (Robotic Process Automation) and robotisation of two business processes at the Magnitogorsk hardware and calibration plant MMK-METIZ.

The agreement between the two companies for the provision of business process automation services was signed at the start of this year. Through joint efforts, using the proprietary methods of process identification of the Centre for RPA Expertise and Innovation, the processes for pilot implementation were selected.

The first process concerning the production sphere is the “Offloading of completed product tests data into the corporate information system (CIS)”. As part of the project, an automated RPA programme will be developed, which will record the completed product tests data taken from the network folder of the CIS, which, in turn, will significantly reduce the labour required. The automated programme will be able to perform a job that had previously required two people, thereby saving skilled specialists for more creative and important tasks. The second process is the “Preparation of documents when processing employee secondments and combination of professions (positions)”, which is being implemented in the labour and wages department. As part of the project, an automated RPA programme will be developed, which will automatically (without human involvement) speed up the process of document preparation for secondments and combination of professions (positions), which will eliminate human error, as well as free up employees from monotonous work to tasks requiring human involvement. According to a preliminary assessment, based on data obtained from MMK-METIZ’s specialists, the labour requirements of the process are currently 344 man-hours per month and the implementation of an automated programme will entirely free up these labour requirements.

The automation of these business processes at MMK-METIZ is expected to be completed by the end of this year. A large-scale project is planned for 2021, aimed at identifying processes at the hardware and calibration plant which are suitable from programme automation, with the subsequent automation of these processes. 
RPA technology at MMK Group is being developed as part of the strategic initiative “Industry 4.0”, which envisions a comprehensive digitalisation of business processes with the aim of improving production efficiency. For this reason, in July 2018 the Centre for RPA Expertise and Innovation was set up under MMK-Informservice. The programme automation project involves the primary functional directions: finance and economics, accounting, supply chains and logistics, personnel. The process will embrace all subdivisions of the Magnitogorsk Iron & Steel Works (MMK). Currently, several dozen RPA automated programmes are in operation. The integration of programme automatisation and technologies like AI (Artificial Intelligence), ML (Machine Learning) and NLP (Natural Language Processing) enables MMK to use RPA automated programmes to solve increasingly complex problems.