SIBUR presents its digital transformation wins to Russia’s Prime Minister

Moscow, 23 October 2019. SIBUR’s corporate centre hosted a meeting on leveraging digitalisation to improve industrial safety at production facilities and reduce administrative burden experienced by businesses as part of supervisory control and regulation. The participants included Russia’s Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Kozak, Minister of Labour and Social Protection Maxim Topilin, Head of the Federal Service for Supervision of Natural Resources Svetlana Radionova, Head of the Federal Service for Environmental, Technological and Nuclear Supervision Alexei Aleshin, heads of other agencies and leaders of Russia’s industrial majors.

Ahead of the meeting, Dmitry Medvedev had a chance to take a look at the innovations brought about by SIBUR’s digitalisation efforts. Among them was biometric employee and visitor identification technology rolled out at SIBUR’s offices several years ago. Designed to prevent any unauthorised access, it also makes entry into the office more convenient for employees and authorised visitors. The technology can administer most of the security control functions previously performed by a human, including ID/pass checks, visitor’s face recognition to match the image against the person’s ID, pass application verification, storing of the visitor’s name and image, and pass issuance.  As an authorised visitor approaches the turnstile, it opens automatically.

Prime Minister was shown mobile inspection and repairs apps that eliminate paper workflow, video analytics for controlling the production process and product quality, a tool for visualising the link between the economics of production and the process mode, explosion-proof IIoT sensors for reducing accident rates and improving efficiency, and private LTE networks for safe and reliable data transfer. More details are available on sibur.digital.

Digital tools enable more efficient and data-driven decision making. One example is a KPI system rolled out at five SIBUR sites, which helps to visualise the link between the economics of production and the current process mode so that the operator can opt for the best parameters possible.

During the meeting, Dmitry Konov, Chairman of the Management Board at SIBUR Holding, presented a pilot project for a remote safety monitoring system. Implemented at SIBUR’s Perm site together with the Federal Service for Ecological, Technological and Nuclear Supervision (Rostechnadzor), the solution enables early identification of potential threats and helps to assess production risks. As a result, those can be mitigated early on: should any incident occur, employees get notified to respond quickly. All data on industrial safety are sent to Rostechnadzor’s Analysis and Response Centre. The launch of the system at the Perm site of SIBUR has been a staged exercise initiated in 2016. The solution processes around 18,000 signals in real time, showing the current state of industrial safety at the facility.   

For the project to be rolled out to other production facilities, the government needs to pass the respective draft federal law that would regulate the implementation of a remote safety monitoring system and the establishment of a state system for safety monitoring, as well as by-laws on the interaction between control and supervisory bodies and the supervised facilities in the process of setting up remote monitoring.

The participants of the meeting supported the proposed additions and improvements to the legislation, stating that these changes will also benefit other digital solutions. For example, processes that still rely on paper-based equipment data sheets and log records will become more efficient, and so will the remote monitoring system at hazardous production facilities and other digital tools designed to improve industrial safety, employee performance, and operating speeds. Moving away from the use of paper-based media in operations will increase labour productivity, transparency, and process manageability.

Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s Prime Minister, said: “The remote safety monitoring system for hazardous facilities is currently being tested by Rostekhnadzor. It provides real-time updates on facilities and can identify irregularities caused by disruptions in technological processes – in other words, any deviations from normal process parameters. This way, any potential incidents and risks can be spotted and, most importantly, prevented at the earliest possible stage. Today, we were able to see the system in action at SIBUR.”