How KTZ goes digital in transportation

According to Eugeny Terenov, CEO of SAP Kazakhstan, SAP is not just a business applications’ supplier, but also a partner in innovations for its entire eco-system.

Over 190 Kazakh companies from 25 industries are clients of SAP. The company actively develops a partner eco-system as it shifts from the traditional partner model to innovative one while working with Kazakh companies on local developments.

“SAP promotes Kazakh developments worldwide. There are over 300 thousand clients of SAP around the world”, he said.

The University Alliance is another thing the company is actively working on. According to Mr Eugeny Terenov, the University Alliance is a model of work that includes SAP as the technological company and universities as the side which prepares, develops human potential and the client that formulates technological tasks, information tasks. At the interface of joint work, corporate innovations occur within the University Alliance. 

“All this is done in order to step up and move away from traditional automatization toward intellectual enterprise, which is a new concept being positioned as the next revolutionary step once the technological level enabling the application of all data by collecting them in one digital core is reached and routine is removed from human activities through robotization, big date analysis, crowdsourcing solutions. This is how intelligent business works”, he said.

One of the examples is the national company Kazakhstan Temir Zholy that commenced the project in digitalization, striving to enhance planning and projecting procedures.

 “Kazakhstan Temir Zholy like other transport companies strives to reach its goals through modern technologies, automatization of processes either business processes at the management level or production processes”, Sholpan Omarbekova, financial controller, NC Kazakhstan Temir Zholy, said.

The core task of the national company is to enhance the operational effectiveness and its solution led to the business transformation program that has been carried out by KTZ.

As part of the business transformation program, the project entitled “Integrated planning system” was launched in 2018. This project largely focuses on improving planning and projecting procedures at all stages starting from projecting a demand, production processes to projecting and approving financial economic indicators for the short term and medium term of 5 years. The project is being carried out on the SAP HANA platform, involving SAP consultants, experts.

“Speaking generally, in terms of automatization the project resolves the serious task which is automated processing of a great deal of data and to search for more optimal solutions to specific tasks through automated systems. To project the volumes of transport is an essential and important factor in terms of planning. Once this project has been implemented, the tools to project the volumes of transportation will be supplemented with mathematical models of projection tools. These tools will enable to handle a huge amount of data we have collected, as well as consider macroeconomic parameters, trends in development of world economies”, she said.

The system once it spots the results of processed data will present a transportation plan to specific sites for the train in terms of categories of goods set in the system. This will lead to the specification of projection in terms of direction of flows of wagons, types of train, types of transportation, mode of propulsion, the capacity.

“More precise data will allow the system, which is another major task, to project the right need in resources and to set control over resource consumption at specific sites, routes”, she said.  

The project implies in automated mode to optimize flows of wagons, consider production capacities of a railway network, production capacities of train traction, wagon, it also will integrate economic tasks to reduce variable costs. This project aims at finding more optimal solutions that combine the fulfillment of all tasks set, including the optimization of costs, resources from production capacities to human resources. The system will produce correct optimized routes.

The enhanced accuracy of projecting the need in transportation, specification of projecting the optimization of routes, increased speed of projection, speed of trains is expected once the project is completed.

“Digital transformation is quite a well-known trend in the world. Kazakhstan Temir Zholy does not stand by as there are several projects being under way in this direction”, Madiar Sultanbek, KTZ representative, said.

The roll-out of SAP solutions not only changes the business process, but also requires re-training of staff, personnel. If staff were asked for mechanical routine work, now they are asked for more intellectual work, analytical with machines taking on routine calculations.

For reference: SAP (“Systems, Applications & Products in Data Processing”) is a German multinational software corporation that makes enterprise software to manage business operations and customer relations. The company has customers in over 180 countries, including Kazakhstan. SAP held a forum in Nur Sultan on 30 May, showcasing its new technological solutions to Kazakh organizations, business structures, entrepreneurs, and so on.

Adlet Seilkhanov

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