When choosing an engineering specialist, no customer will concentrate on technical solutions alone. Much emphasis is laid on the arrangement of business processes as well. “This is especially true for the industrial automation market,” says Mikhail Malinin, First Deputy CEO of RASU. “Every customer prefers to see how the contractor organizes and regulates its processes and checks whether it meets all the requirements in terms of both production organization and compliance with standards applicable in the customer’s country. Once they get the measure of how all the business processes are arranged, they can be sure that the end product will fit in.” This is what prompted the need for a single integrator of industrial automation assets.
An automated process control system may be composed of up to 50 independent subsystems, all of them designed and supplied by different companies. “RASU as an integrator is set to become a communication medium and create a uniform environment for the system development, design, manufacture and commissioning,” says Andrei Gordeev from RASU.
The newborn company has ambitious goals. The main goal is to deliver automation solutions to be used at Russian-designed nuclear stations abroad and meeting the strictest national regulatory requirements.
“When Rosatom comes to a country whose infrastructure and nuclear power laws are to be created from scratch, it causes no problems; it is far more difficult to market your product in countries already having their own nuclear regulatory framework,” Mikhail Malinin says. This is the problem RASU is going to solve during the next three years. “We are now distributing tasks between our divisions. The work will run in stages. Within a year and a half, we will diversify our product range by country and industry. In another two years, we will have a product fully certified to regulatory standards of our customers’ countries and ready to be supplied on a turnkey basis,” Mikhail Kalinin assured.
The company also plans to sell process control systems outside of comprehensive NPP construction offerings, focusing on the modernization and maintenance of nuclear stations. “We could deal both with Russian- and foreign-designed stations,” Mikhail Kalinin said. The company’s engineers will be able to upgrade both separate subsystems and the entire process control system.
Besides, RASU is ready to cooperate with companies from other industries where industrial automation solutions are sought after. This is a new and important task. “We are going to promote process control systems for non-nuclear markets as an individual product,” Mikhail Kalinin said. “Among them are oil and gas, shipbuilding, defense, heavy engineering or thermal power markets.”
