The mining and metallurgical group Metinvest is transforming its business processes with artificial intelligence (AI) through automation, the use of drones, and the application of these tools in the financial sector.
“In 2020, we were able to automate about 70% of our processes, with 30% remaining inaccessible due to technological limitations. Today, this figure has risen to 95%. This opens up completely new opportunities, and we are actively moving in this direction,” said Anton Ishchenko, head of the R&D product development team at Metinvest Digital, at the 13th Annual Forum of Financial Directors of Ukraine in Kyiv.
According to him, in five years of working with intelligent process automation, more than 500 solutions based on various technologies have been implemented, which has made it possible to automate about 200,000 hours of work, equivalent to approximately 100 full-time employees.
He noted that modern intelligent automation at Metinvest is based on a combination of RPA (routine operation robotization), low-code platforms (rapid solution development without complex coding), Process and Task Mining (process analysis to identify inefficiencies), and AI (automation of complex tasks and real-time data processing).
One of the main innovations is the active involvement of employees in the automation process. At Metinvest, employees independently record their business processes and work activities using Task Mining, Power Automate, and SAP Scripts. This allows for the formation of high-quality and structured automation requirements from the ground up, reduces the workload on business analysts, and speeds up the transition from idea to finished solution. The collected data and processes are analyzed automatically using AI and then quickly transformed into working automated scenarios. As a result, the time and resources spent on development and implementation are reduced by tens of percent. In the context of limited business budgets, this approach has become extremely important, emphasized Ishchenko.
The result of this practice is the creation of the Application Warehouse corporate platform, a centralized repository of universal applications for automating typical business processes in various departments of the company. This significantly increases the availability of digital tools: new solutions are quickly implemented, distributed among employees, and do not need to be developed from scratch for each task. Currently, about a thousand employees use the platform.
“We continue to invest in research and development to create business value and remain among the leaders in digital transformation,” Ishchenko concluded.
In turn, the group’s CFO, Yulia Dankova, pointed to the comprehensive implementation of computer vision and intelligent document processing technologies in the company’s financial and production processes. According to her, modern solutions based on Computer Vision enable instant reading, analysis, and classification of documents from various sources, from scanners to corporate mail, without the need for prior training.
Since 2023, Metinvest has been using its own intelligent document processing system, myOCR. The platform, which processes up to 40,000 pages of documents per month, including confidential ones, has been implemented at seven large enterprises of the group. It saves about 20,000 hours of working time per year and is integrated with a universal translator from foreign languages into Ukrainian. It contains modules for identifying stamps, signatures, contextual analysis, document classification, data verification, and extraction. At its core are advanced AI models.
“For example, a company is importing goods from an Italian factory. The automated process receives a package of documents in Italian and English, compares them with the accounting system data, generates an authentic translation into Ukrainian, adds it to the package, and transfers it to the electronic document storage system. For financial departments, this has been a real breakthrough in the speed and convenience of document flow,” said the CFO.
The CFO added that the company has implemented a unified solution for SPAIS computer vision systems. This system helps to identify safety violations in production, such as employees being in hazardous areas or without personal protective equipment. When a violation is detected, the program signals it and stores the data in the appropriate systems. This solution is already being used at several Ukrainian enterprises of the group. SPAIS also helps detect damage at Metinvest’s production facilities using drones.
Another solution from the family of computer vision systems at Metinvest enterprises, which has undergone pilot testing and is being implemented for industrial use, is automatic slab quality control.
Dankova emphasized that the group’s assets operate exclusively on proven, uncompromised licensed systems. Microsoft solutions and in-house developments based on the Microsoft technology stack are recognized as priority technologies in this area.
