Innovative business process support

Global digitalization sets new pace of development for manufacturing companies. Being one of the most technologically advanced and strategically important industries, the power industry is at the forefront of change. Unipro strives to keep pace with the development of technology and to follow global trends. The Company is carrying out a lot of consistent work on digital transformation. The process of building a “smart enterprise” has begun.

Digital transformation at Unipro is a meaningful, strategically driven process of change in the business which includes a set of transformations through the introduction of an innovative culture, adaptation of the business model, widespread use of data, focus on customers and value management.

In order to form a modern process digital platform for further business development, improvement of efficiency of business processes due to their standardization and optimization using the best practices introduction of the Microsoft Dynamics 365 integrated information system began in 2020.

Furthermore, to avoid the risks related to the termination of vendor support and to ensure conditions for enhancement of opportunities of working with information systems transition of budgeting process to the IBM Planning Analytics platform was completed.

Digitization of the operational and dispatching control was carried out by means of implementation of the information system of electronic operations logs.

The works for transition of a number of digital technologies proven at the pilot stages were carried out.

The project of updating the corporate portal was implemented, within which a new interface for the corporate portal was developed, the current services were restructured and optimized and new services were developed.

Within the anti-COVID measures that provide for transferring the Company’s employees to teleworking, the IT department specialists arranged about 600 teleworking places for the Company’s employees in next to no time in order to maintain conditions contributing to the high-quality fulfilment of their functional duties by employees.

More than 120 de-personified workplaces were arranged for the employees in the office of the Headquarters according to new epidemiological standards. Such workplaces could be preliminarily booked by the employees.

In order to ensure communication of the employees and to improve the availability of in-house corporate information resources and systems of the Company, the bandwidth of Internet access channels was increased in the Headquarters in Moscow and at the power plants in the regions.

The maturity of the Company’s IT infrastructure made it possible to respond to the challenges of the pandemic and to ensure that the employees were immediately transferred to teleworking.

The plans for 2021 are to stabilize the operation of Microsoft Dynamics 365 and to further develop digital initiatives. The key focus is to ensure the operational excellence by identifying processes that have the greatest potential for cost reduction and communications improvement. The priority areas of that focus will primarily include the following solutions:

• robotic automation of processes;
• digitalization of internal interfaces (joints) and interaction with information consumers;
• increase in the availability of data and its use in decision-making;
• reducing the number of steps when running processes in the information systems;
• transformation of processes that involve a large number of recurring actions.

The Video Analytics project should be highlighted among the wide range of digital initiatives planned for the implementation in 2021. The project objective is to increase the performance by:

• identifying deviations of the actual productive working time of the brigades from the target time;
• analysis of the reasons for deviations;
• developing corrective activities;
• improving the quality of repair planning.

The Subscriber’s User Account Implementation project will provide the customers being Unipro PJSC subscribers with round-the-clock access to their user account data, i.e. viewing fee accruals, printing receipts, transferring meter readings, paying for the services by a bank card and sending messages to the service company. The effects from the project implementation will be as follows: increased efficiency in interaction with the subscribers, unified electronic document flow with the subscribers in the one stop shop mode, increased openness and availability of information on applicable tariffs and procedures for accruing the value of services, possibility of prompt provision of individual recipients and general public with information on emerging events, news, announcements regarding various areas of housing and public utilities, changes in the legislative or regulatory framework.

In 2021, it is planned to modernize the virtualization platform and to implement a number of other infrastructure IT projects.

In the mid-term, the digitalization at Unipro will be focused on achieving the target vision of the function within the Smart Enterprise.