JSC Polyus Krasnoyarsk has launched a pilot electronic logging system for registering employee proposals for operational improvements, as part of its production system development initiative. Within the first month of the launch over 500 proposals have been submitted, dozens of which have been accepted and progressed to the financing stage.
Employees of Polyus Krasnoyarsk can now use the Company intranet portal to submit their ideas in electronic format.
The ideas submission system is the result of joint work by the departments for technological process automation and operational performance improvement. It is currently accepting proposals on cost cuttings and improvements to safety, working conditions, operational performance, and environmental impact. This online submission system is available to the employees of the Krasnoyarsk Business Unit (which includes Olimpiada and Blagodatnoye mines), with plans to gradually roll it out to the rest of the Group.
By virtue of its speed and simplicity the newly introduced system will help motivate Polyus employees to submit their ideas and initiatives. By increasing employee engagement levels it will also help the Company achieve its top-level objectives of creating a collaborative culture of innovation to improve operational performance.
Denis Zinchenko, Senior Control Systems Engineer, commented:“The electronic log is an evolution of the original proposal submission initiative we launched in 2014. Originally, ideas were discussed at management meetings and brought to life via action items. We then switched to on-site boxes for collecting proposals, then to calls and emails from the authors and responsible persons, as well as their managers. The volume of information was growing and needed systematisation, so we came up with the electronic log. It can be accessed from any work computer, automatically detects and emails the next person in line for approval, and makes the overall process faster and more transparent.”
Alexey Kazantsev, Project Head of the Operational Performance Department, commented:“We have made it very straightforward to submit ideas electronically — the submission can be completed in just a few steps. Employees need to specify the area and scope of their initiative, describe the perceived issue and the proposed solution, specifying the authors and the persons responsible (if the optimization has already been carried out). Once submitted, the proposal is given a unique tracking number.”