Research of digital transformation processes of mining and metallurgical companies of the Russian Federation

In periods of economic and political instability, Russian companies in leading sectors of the economy are significantly affected by the negative impact of a number of environmental factors. This requires the largest companies to develop and implement new approaches to management, review development strategies, and switch to new solutions and technologies covering all areas of their activities. Along with these changes, the largest global and Russian companies have been actively implementing business transformation programs over the past 5 years, among which a special role is given to digital transformation programs. Metallurgical companies were among the first to develop and start implementing large-scale projects to digitalize their processes, from the area of extraction of raw materials to the sale of finished products. The purpose of this work is to in Russia, both in general and in the context of individual companies. The analysis of the effectiveness of digital transformation in the industry is carried out in three areas: the study of industry indicators of innovative activity and the introduction of technological models in business processes; studying cases of successful digital transformation at enterprises that are leaders in the industry, as well as their plans for the implementation of such programs, and, finally, analyzing the performance indicators of companies in periods after the implementation of business digitalization projects. In the course of the study, indicators for evaluating the effectiveness of digital transformation were proposed, a list of digitalization leaders in the mining and metallurgical industry was compiled, cases of implementing digital solutions were studied, and indicators of the effectiveness of investments in digitalization projects were analyzed. This made it possible to draw conclusions about an increase in the capital expenditures of the largest companies in 2019–2020, and then in 2021 an increase in key performance indicators of these companies. Promising areas for further research are: including more companies in the analysis; dissemination of research methodology for the analysis of companies from other sectors of the Russian economy; comparing Russian companies with global ones in order to identify the vector and results of digitalization in the respective economies; supplementing the analysis methodology with industry indicators of the activity and effectiveness of digital transformation; studying the risks and errors of implementing digital transformation programs in companies in various sectors of the economy.