Media Center

TMK delegates its administrative matters to a corporate chatbot

TMK and PARMA Technologies Group, a Russian IT company, in a technological partnership with Microsoft, have implemented a corporate chatbot at TMK to automate the processing of administrative and general matters. The interactive assistant with integrated artificial intelligence has freed up 20% of TMK’s staff specialists and drastically accelerated submittal of requests to its Service Desk.

The chatbot uses the Microsoft Azure platform and components of Bot FrameWork and Azure SQL DB. The first stage of the project was deployed at TMK’s procurement department, where AI took over the processing of calls from production departments and verification of order statuses. To do this, the chatbot has learned to poll databases, analyze and consolidate data, predict timelines, and communicate the results. As a result, the production departments’ requests are answered two times faster, while the procurement department, partially relieved of the administrative workload, has fully concentrated on procurement for the holding company.

The second stage of cooperation between TMK and PARMA TG included a corporate chatbot to perform administrative and IT tasks. The Company has created a single inbound channel for inquiries, from ordering office supplies to issuing passes and organizing workstations. The chatbot is also used for submitting requests to the Service Desk and employee proposals for the corporate Idea Exchange. All services can be requested via the chatbot by any user of the corporate Microsoft Teams app.

Further development of the chatbot involves its transformation into a full-fledged digital navigator and tool for internal communications across all operations. It can greatly help with onboarding or navigating corporate IT resources, ensuring easy access to internal services, promoting employee engagement, and improving the corporate culture.

A cross-platform solution enables access to the chatbot from any modern smartphone. The virtual assistant maintains the dialogue by analyzing the sentiment of the conversation and can also understand voice, if necessary. To personify the chatbot and give the communication process a human touch, the developers named the assistant TyoMKa following a corporate voting.

“In a constantly evolving company, its talent pool is the core value. To take maximum advantage of its human resources, TMK aims to free employees from routine tasks and refocus their potential on industry-specific issues that require higher qualifications. Thanks to our new corporate chatbot, we have been able to save the time of our administrative staff and create a single clear algorithm for all Company employees to promptly request a service. At the same time, we continue to improve the chatbot by adding more services and functions, expanding its technical capabilities, and training it in intelligent recognition and other operations”, said Dmitry Yakob, TMK’s IT Director.

“The first step in our cooperation with TMK was to develop a chatbot, which would ensure prompt forecasts on product shipments to the warehouse. We chose the robust and secure Microsoft Azure platform, which allows us to further improve the solution by adding more ML services. Thanks to intelligent call processing, the scope of the chatbot’s application has significantly expanded as it has taken over many tasks related to organizing internal communications, supporting omnichannel interaction with services, and navigating internal corporate information resources. An intelligent assistant is a flexible solution that evolves and adapts to customer needs. PARMA TG specialists continue collecting requests from TMK employees and expanding the bot’s capabilities to automate routine tasks”, said Eugene Ovcharov, CEO of PARMA TG.

“TMK’s willingness to embrace change and create a new culture of engagement within the company has helped find a solution that boosts employee performance. As a result, the customer has gained a competitive advantage over other market players”, said Michael Sizov, Commercial Partners Director at Microsoft in Russia.