Russian steel producer reaps the benefits of innovative investment

In 2018, the Russian steel plant Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works (MMK) invested about RUB 500 million in energy efficiency initiatives.

According to MMK, one of the key instruments for improving energy efficiency is "the development and implementation of a platform for innovative proposals." This significantly increased the number of ideas submitted and the percentage of implemented ones. Over the past year, a total of 680 ideas were submitted under the program, 139 of which were implemented with an expected annual cost of 73.25 million rubles.

Initially, the platform only dealt with energy efficiency, but its effectiveness prompted a decision in 2017 to accept a broader area of ​​concern and cover additional topics, including more economical use of materials and technical resources, as well as environment, labor protection, industrial health. and safety and much more.

In 2018, information from existing platforms was transferred to the EMP, resulting in an archive of previously submitted and implemented proposals, now numbering more than 19,000. In addition, in 2017 and 2018, an initiative was launched to introduce an Idea Management Unit in all companies of the MMK Group. Information is currently being transferred to EMP from MMK Metalurji (Turkey).

MMK employees can now submit their own ideas and submit them electronically. MMK claims that the reliability of decision-making on capital-intensive energy-efficient projects,

MMK claims that the development of the Energy Management Platform has made it possible to automate many operations that were previously performed manually. "The author of an innovative proposal can not only submit an idea in electronic form, but also you can track the progress of the proposal on a mobile device and make changes to it if necessary," the company explained. This became possible as a result of the integration of EMP into the MMK Evolution mobile application. MMK is also testing a feature that will allow the author of a submitted innovation proposal to charge a fee in exchange for using or implementing the idea.

In cases where it is difficult to evaluate the result of the implementation of a particularly original project, a special verification algorithm is used.