MMK IT Project Wins Global CIO Competition
Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works’ (MMK) digital procurement technology was awarded in the Global CIO Project of the Year competition in the category “Best Project for Modelling Industrial Business Processes Using Domestic Technologies.”
During 2022, MMK implemented digital twin and process mining technology to model and enhance its procurement process. This is the first integrated solution in the Russian metallurgical industry for end-to-end management, monitoring and optimisation of the procurement process that uses process mining software, simulation modelling and NLP analysis. The goal of the project is to optimise inventories, shorten the procurement cycle and reduce the labour costs for tender organisation.
The IT suppliers for the project were the Next Robotisation Technologies Centre and Innodata. The platform chosen for the project was Proceset, which is produced by Infomaximum.
“We have a new tool to improve procurement efficiency at MMK, and we plan to scale it up for use throughout MMK Group as a whole. This project enabled us not only to achieve real operational results but also to improve our IT capabilities as a result of our partnership with the Next Centre, which is going to work on projects to analyse and optimise processes at other MMK Group companies using process mining technology,” said Vadim Feoktistov, MMK’s Chief IT Specialist.
According to him, a digital model based on real data makes it possible to observe the procurement process, identify bottlenecks, make changes and immediately observe and monitor their consequences. “And the most interesting thing is that we have created a process simulation system that enables us to change the settings and predict what will happen to the process – that is, we can fine-tune the process by experimenting with real data and incorporate only those changes that were successful during the simulation,” Vadim Feoktistov said.
The Global CIO Project of the Year competition took place for the 11th time this year, with projects assessed through independent online voting by members of the Global CIO professional community. MMK’s IT projects have already won this prestigious competition on several occasions. In 2022, experts chose MMK’s digital support office for scrap metal supplies as the winner in the “Best RPA Solution in Metallurgy” category, while MMK’s online marketplace was among the winners this year.