Russian steelmaker Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works (MMK) has announced that it will be extending its co-operation with Oracle for the next five years to implement Industry 4.0.

According to MMK, ‘the optimisation and unification’ of the company’s business processes ‘on the basis of a unified Corporate Information System (CIS) will facilitate the business efficiency of the company.

The Oracle deal is being billed as a ‘large-scale co-operation programme’.

MMK plans to update its corporate information system to the latest version of Oracle E-Business Suite R12 and expand the ERP system to other companies within the group, doubling the coverage of employees working in a single information field.

The company believes that its planned large-scale modernisation programme ‘will enable the completion of the Industry 4.0 tasks via the integration of all the company’s information flows’.

MMK claims that ‘this unified information system includes the management of production (continuous and discrete), inventories, repairs, purchases (including an electronic trading platform), finances, personnel (including payroll), projects, orders and sales.’

The company is considering the possibility of industrial use of Oracle’s SaaS-services for company performance management (EPM Cloud) personnel (HSM Cloud) and e-commerce and sales management (CX Cloud).

Andrey Eremin, director for economics at MMK and project manager, commented: “The concept of Industry 4.0 relies on end-to-end information flows as sources for the modelling of the enterprise’s processes and for forecasting the results of its activity.”

Eremin added that modernisation of MMK’s CIS ‘will enable the optimisation of business processes and guarantee the possibility of further development of the CIS, taking into account the new functional possibilities of the Oracle E-Business Suite.’

The pilot operation will be launched in April next year and the industrial operation is scheduled to begin in July 2019.

Oracle’s Sergey Tabulin, director of the company’s business applications department, said: “It is strategically important for us to expand co-operation with global leaders such as MMK Group.”