Russia Wants Online Control Center for Shipbuilding Industry

"Significance of the shipbuilding products for the Russian economy induces the need for a continuous monitoring of all current industrial processes, evaluation of financial and technological status of the leading organizations, managerial influence on economic interests of shipbuilding companies to make their activities more effective", says the document of the ministry available to Mil.Press Today.


Scope of reports that shipyards have to complete will continue growing due to the national course towards import substitution and diversification. This is one of the reasons why the ministry kicked off a sector-wide revision of documentation. The agency wants to figure out which reports are really important for decision-making, and digitalize them.

The problem is that many shipyards and machine-building plants work on government orders and supply their products abroad. "The planned innovations... may potentially violate the state secrecy laws", states the document approved by Sergey Mamonov, acting director of Department of Shipbuilding Industry and Marine Engineering at the Ministry of Industry & Trade.

So far, Center Research Institute remains the only company offered to analyse the whole Russian marine industry. The institute evaluated its services at 117 mln rubles, and in 2009 was authorized to collect and process the primary statistical and administrative data of defense and industrial companies.

The state-funded study will last till the end of 2020, and only after that the ministry will form the order for R&D project. Meanwhile, the United Shipbuilding Corporation (USC) has already integrated some elements of online analytical system.

"The USC’s common dispatch center is based on the corporate-level Program & Project Management System, which takes data from lower companies’ project management systems. As long as the shipbuilding industry does not have any standard for chart structure, we use the common ‘checkpointing’ methodology presented as a corporate standard. Currently, the system is being filled with data on the ongoing projects. The new projects are subject to the said system from the very beginning", a top-ranking source from USC told Mil.Press Today.

Igor Ponomaryov, director general of Severnaya Verf shipyard shared in his interview to Mil.Press Today that the industry did not need any extra options like an online ‘dispatch center’. As for him, within one ship project, "currently, interaction between designers, shipbuilders and the yard is well enough aligned".

Global digitalization of shipbuilding has been underway since 2016 under the R&D project Verf-M. The work involves creation of a specialized software information system for project management of construction of civil marine equipment and facilities, development of a unified industrial reference data system. According to sources of Mil.Press Today, implementation timelines were deferred.

At the state level, digitalization of corporate reporting was mentioned by the governmental commission for IT usage in improvement of living standards and business conditions in the protocol dated December 18, 2017. The document set the task to create legal conditions for integration of new reporting collection rules, including statistical information.