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The Big Initiative Theory - Russian Experience in Digital Transformation of Industrial Enterprises



Each digital universe is born out of great need and begins with great initiative. The desire to increase competitiveness, as well as to enable the company to develop and grow in an ever-changing economic environment, is becoming the main goal of digital transformation. To learn more about them, we interviewed the IT directors of Severstal, SIBUR, TMK, MMK, representatives of consulting and developers.

The goal of digital transformation is to ensure the sustainable development of companies in the context of the rapidly growing 4th industrial revolution. For many organizations, this means revising existing business models and radically changing established business practices, including organizing processes and people within the company, interacting with customers, suppliers and competitors, introducing new standards for collaboration and agile principles.

“One of the key challenges in the modern world is the speed of response to changes,” said Anna Kulashova, director of work with large Microsoft organizations in Russia. “Technologies, including AI, can significantly speed up the processes, however, in our opinion, the organization’s culture, modern forms of employee interaction that maximize the creative potential of individual employees and teams leading to achieving the goals and objectives of the company are the key success factors.”

The transition to digital transformation was natural for companies whose business model was initially tied to data. In the manufacturing sector, we have to digitalize a huge number of processes, including physical ones, so the number of tasks to be solved is extremely wide. As a result of communication with Russian experts, we identified four priorities for digital transformation in industry:

  • Exclusion of a person from routine and hazardous production processes.
  • Creating digital doubles.
  • Resource allocation and time tracking.
  • Organization of a modern communication culture.



Managers working at Russian enterprises generally supported this prioritization. So, Alisa Melnikova, director of digital and information technologies at SIBUR,  agrees that they are all certainly important for SIBUR enterprises, but emphasizes the need to ensure industrial safety, the exclusion of manual labor and the exclusion of people from dangerous routine work. And this priority is directly related to immediate plans. Dmitry Yakob, Director of Information Technology at TMK,  believes that it is important to clearly distinguish between industrial safety and the rejection of routine labor.

Digital twins include energy optimization and resource planning for production, supply chains and predictive maintenance (maintenance and repair). Experts give as an example aggregates, the use of which, it would seem, has already reached the peak of opportunities, however, when a smart system starts to decide on the operating mode, productivity grows by 7%. The predictive MRO used at one of SIBUR's enterprises made it possible to adjust the operation of the extruder in such a way as to completely eliminate stops.

Russian experience in digital transformation


The Russian leaders in the field of digital transformation have already accumulated rich experience, which the IT directors told us about. Be sure to read the interview, because in this article we will not be able to reflect all the details, and the most interesting is in them. We will focus on three topics that have sounded most often.

The most burning topic was the education of digital culture in the company. As one of the experts emphasized, digital interaction is largely a matter of decision-making speed, which directly affects profitability, so quick wins are very important for the company. A new culture is impossible without properly built processes, which sometimes requires changes in the internal structure and even leads to the creation of specialized units, such as the data processing office at the Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works, which   Vadim Feoktistov, director of MMK-Informservice LLC, told us about . , a company belonging to the PJSC MMK Group.

Directly adjacent to this issue is the competent methodology for piloting and scaling up individual digitalization successes. An expert from a consulting company shared the words of one of the clients: for him, the main problem is how to scale the completed pilot project to the entire company as a whole, so that digitalization becomes part of its DNA itself. Dmitry Yakob believes that for this a methodology for turning initiatives into projects should be built, and the   creation of an R&D center is given as an example .



The third topic is unmanned technology. It arose among many speakers, but reached the most vivid embodiment in the story of Alisa Melnikova about the  project of her dreamsas a result of which in five years a digital enterprise of the future will be created, in fact a drone plant.

Digital Transformation Solutions for Industry


Earlier this year, Microsoft's vice president, Judson Althof,  noted that customers from various industries had moved from introducing technology to creating new ones. This is not just an observation, but a statistical trend defined by the State of Tech Intensity study. This approach accelerates changes in these organizations and helps them promote their business in new ways.

Microsoft customers from various industries put IT at the center of their business strategies. In the last quarter of 2019, we observed many initiatives in which customers use technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), the Internet of things (IoT), and Microsoft cloud-based machine learning.

Solutions and Examples


Understanding the needs of customers, Microsoft encourages partners to develop solutions for the digital transformation of production. Much has already been created, and more about these technologies and examples of their use can be found in separate materials of our project. The experience of other enterprises and the expertise of developers must be taken into account. This will help minimize failures in the way of your own experiments. Then the digital universe will begin with a big initiative, not a big bang.

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