November 28, 2014. Uralvagonzavod Scientific & Production Corporation coordinated a professional skills contest for its process and design engineers.

According to the corporation’s press service, over sixty young workers from the corporation’s member enterprises have joined in the contest for the first time this year. They come from Nizhniy Tagil-based Uralvagonzavod and Ural Scientific & Technological Integrated Works, Nizhniy Novgorod-based Burevestnik Scientific Research Institute, Omsk-based Omsktransmash, and Yekaterinburg-based Uraltransmash and Plant 9.

There were two stages to this competition, with separate selection rounds for designers and process engineers. Contestants had to do tests on labor protection and the company’s history as well as pass through practical and theoretical parts of the round.

Twelve young employees made it to the final round, in six randomly created teams. All of them had to cope with one and the same task: improve or find design, technological, or organizational improvement potential in the process of installing a tank-car onto a platform.

Deputy Chief Engineer for Technology & Production Development Yaroslav Rydlevsky, Uralvagonzavod’s Chief Welder Andrei Masalkov, Tagiltransmashproyekt’s Chief Engineer Sergey Zaplatin and other experts were on the judges’ panel to give their assessments.

The first prize went to Alexander Larionov and Ekaterina Matushkina, who came up with four possible solutions to the problem. Olga Karpova and Irina Bakshayeva, who suggested replacing a welded seam with a forged one, won the second prize. Svetlana Babushkina and Evgeniy Peres-Leal, who improved the way the connection clip was attached to the platform, were in the third place.

‘The teams had forty-eight hours to find technological or design solutions to the problem given, and all of these solutions had to make sense financially. All of the proposals were quite interesting. The contestants’ presentations will be forwarded to Ural Railway Carriage Design Office as technological proposals so that these ideas could be used as the basis for a universal solution on how to attach a tank-car to a platform,’ Chair of the Judges’ Board Yaroslav Rydlevsky said.

Uralvagonzavod coordinates around 100 department-wide professional skills contests, 10 production sector ones, and 5 all-plant ones every year. Over a thousand employees from the corporation’s various member enterprises take part in these.

‘The engineers’ contest is quite a special one. The corporation pays a lot of attention to training engineering cadre and gives them every chance to do scientific research and carry out design experiments. We also encourage our young workers to join our skills contests,’ the corporation’s press service says.