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El 6 Group (Russia’s flagship carbon-graphite producer) has developed in-house industry-focused software for managing multi-stage production processes. In March, El 6 implemented its MES system for integrated serial accounting of finished products. By April 1, 2025, the company automated accounting of 92% of finished products at its plants in Novosibirsk and Novocherkassk.

The system developed at El 6 is an MES (Manufacturing Execution System) solution, a type of specialized production management software that ensures end-to-end traceability of each and every product. The system collects data from sensors at all stages of production, recording changes in each physical and technical characteristic. Complete information about any unit of product comes to a common track.

The system performs automatic collection and analysis of technological parameters, eliminates the human factor in monitoring production processes and helps the company improve the quality of its products for consumers.

“Each production facility has its own unique features, but in our case, the cost of error is quite high, and the process is multi-stage by nature. The chains include two to seven stages. Thus, we operate under a variety of basic scenarios. We were faced with a choice between an extremely deep customization of a ready-made solution that was available in the market and our in-house development. The project team created a common methodology and released an MVP. We piloted and introduced simple e-signatures to optimize document flow — in our case, it totals dozens of thousands of documents per month across the entire company. At the same time, all analytics involving data on finished products we get via our accounting system for all three plants is done in 1C; so we also built an integration layer to enable data exchange between our solution and 1C ERP. By the way, since our solution collects more detailed information about each unit, the types of reporting for the plants that employ it offer more opportunities,” comments project manager Oksana Koval.

According to Dmitry Semenov, Head of the Automation & IT Department, El 6 Novosibirsk, the performed activities covered 60% of MES functionality. At the same time, El 6 Novosibirsk is already creating a set of scenarios for accounting non-serial products manufactured according to customized drawings. The next stage will be the deployment of the APS module to enable both operational planning and volumetric-calendar scheduling.