Within its Industry 4.0 strategic initiative, Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works (MMK) is actively expanding the scope of its application of RPA (Robotic Process Automation) technology.

RPA, or software robotics, is an innovative technology that has already shown excellent results at MMK Group. This technology makes it possible to transfer the performance of a number of routine tasks to RPA robots, which allows the Company to improve the efficiency of its business processes and increase employee productivity. 
One example of successful RPA implementation is MMK's project to introduce a "smart" robot in the invoice payment process. This project was implemented by specialists from the RPA Competence and Innovation Centre of MMK-Informservice for use by MMK-Accounting Centre. 
The robot in this project has a unique function: it can independently make a decision on whether to continue processing a document or to pass it on to a live individual, based on the results of its analysis of words and phrases contained in the text. The textual information being processed is presented in a free, unstructured form, so it is not possible to set strict rules for text verification. 
The applied approach, based on text mining technology with subsequent "training" for the robot, allows the robot to carry out the task at the level of a human. Meanwhile, the number of erroneous decisions the robot makes decreases with each iteration. For now, the robot is used for processing incoming cash receipts and works with documents in the same way as a human would. The robot processes more than 200 documents per day, which significantly reduces the workload on employees responsible for this process. 
For many years, MMK has been a leader in the implementation of IT technologies among metallurgical companies in Russia. The integration of software robotics and technologies such as AI (artificial intelligence), ML (machine learning) and NLP (natural language processing) allows MMK to use RPA software robots to solve increasingly complex tasks.