The President of Norilsk Nickel presents the digital priorities of the company and the industry

Vladimir Potanin, President of Norilsk Nickel, presented the digital priorities of the company and the industry at the eighth annual conference "Digital Industry of Industrial Russia" in Nizhny Novgorod, ttelegraf.ru reported.
Speaking at the main plenary session of the forum on the topic "Digital Independence of industrial Russia", the head of Norilsk Nickel stressed that the creation of industrial competence centers initiated by the Russian government in the summer of 2022 to replace foreign industry digital products is a viable and effective mechanism that allows you to create interesting products. As Potanin noted, a predictive monitoring system has become a good example of digital modeling – it allows you to influence production processes and avoid unnecessary expenses.
"Moreover, this is also an example of when we do not replace existing foreign software, but create our own, new, copyrighted. As they say, it's a trifle, but it's nice," the head of Norilsk Nickel stressed.
Speaking about projects in the field of mining planning, Potanin noted that they give all co-customers the opportunity to work closely and form requirements, which allows them to count on the rapid and effective implementation of these projects when they are ready by the end of 2024. This creates a good opportunity for their replication.
Potanin made a number of proposals that will speed up and simplify the implementation of the developed software. These include synchronization of the timing of the transition to domestic software in the field of critical infrastructure with the schedule of the industrial competence center; creation of a program to ensure the element base and synchronization with plans for the transition to domestic software; introduction of a moratorium on the creation of state information systems outside the GOSTECH platform and the formation of migration roadmaps for existing industrial competence centers.
"To date, these state information systems, firstly, are multiplying very quickly and we are not keeping up with them. Secondly, they do not meet the general standard," Potanin said. - In particular, for the company, we interact on 74 state information systems, of which four are already at GosTekh and six are in the transition stage. Accordingly, 64 are hanging in the air. It would be good, of course, to declare a moratorium on the creation of state information systems not in the GOSTECH standard, but to carry out the migration of existing ones according to some open schedule understandable so that enterprises can consciously and efficiently switch to this kind of system. In addition, it would, of course, be very attractive for us if it were possible to address such issues as some redundancy of such requirements for exchange to the state system, to create some kind of unified standards, some kind of library of unified data standards that would be managed by GOSTECH, with in order not to provide us with data in different standards."
Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin, for his part, thanked the President of Norilsk Nickel for his participation and stressed the importance of the identified problems.
According to Mishustin, digitalization is of key importance for the industrial sector. To date, more than 160 projects have been approved for the development of Russian software with a total cost of 210 billion rubles. And only 10% of this amount is funded by federal grants. The remaining investments are the enterprises' own funds.
"I would like to thank the heads of such companies separately for the example of technological responsibility of business, many of them are present in the hall today – I am sure that together we will achieve the goals set by the president and make our economy stronger," the Prime Minister stressed.
The main task of industrial competence centers is to ensure the transition to domestic technical solutions in key 35 sectors of the economy. Norilsk Nickel is an active participant and anchor customer of the Metallurgy Industrial Competence Center, which includes 18 companies under the chairmanship of Severstal.
The joint work of industry leaders has allowed the center to form a portfolio of projects – it has almost doubled during the year of operation of the industrial competence center, today there are 25 projects in it. The total cost of their development is 11 billion rubles, 90% of these funds are covered by companies.
Fourteen of the 25 projects are recognized as particularly significant. Norilsk Nickel is developing three products that automate the processes of mining conversion – a mining and geological information system, mining planning and dispatching of underground mining operations.

Alex Shishlo for Rough&Polished