Sinara Pipe Plant (SinTZ), a part of Pipe Metallurgical Company (TMK), summed up the results of its annual improvements contest for 2011 on the eve of Inventor & Innovator’s Day.

Last year, 311 people contributed to the plant’s innovative activity, including 159 young workers and experts. Throughout the year, 1,080 improvement proposals were considered: 306 of them were accepted and 156 actually launched. This saved the company over 8.5m RUR altogether. Also, 1,372,700 kilowatt-hours worth of electric power, 1,101.4 gigacalories worth of heating energy, and 574,100 cubic meters of manufacturing water was saved due to implementation of some energy-saving solutions. This resulted in 4.6m RUR worth of savings.

The contest for the best metal-, material-, and processing tool-saving solutions allowed the company to save 45,400 tons of metal and nearly 1m RUR.

In the SinTZ Leading Department in Innovations category, the first prize was given to the workers of the Chief Engineer Division. Head of Central Plant Lab Sergey Teterin was declared the Best Innovator. Sergey Ashkanov and Vitaly Pilchugov from pipe-rolling shop 3 and Ivan Savchenko from tube-drawing shop 2, with his proposal on saving energy through reducing the engine speed of the main gears (which saved the company about 1.4m RUR), won in the Best Innovation Proposal category,

‘The results of this contest are the best proof of the fact that the quality of the innovations and improvements activity at SinTZ is quite high,’ says the plant’s Managing Director Sergey Chetverikov.