- 69.5% – IT experts
- 29.5% – students
- 20% – more than 10 years of experience
- 5.5 – years of experience on average
KGHM Polska Miedź S.A. way for innovation by organising hackathons
Innovation, what is it really?
Innovation is an integral part of development. When we talk about innovation, we think of positive changes in the product, process, organisation or marketing.
An important step in the introduction of innovation in the company is to look for opportunities, ideas for solving existing problems that the company wants to solve. Sources of innovation ideas can be found among scientists, employees, distribution channel participants or management.
We can distinguish two types of hackathons – internal and external. The former are open to the company’s employees, and their goal is to encourage people from within the organisation to creatively seek solutions to the problems they face on a daily basis. KGHM Polska Miedź S.A. has been organising this kind of projects for years, as part of the “Inventors Market” initiative. External hackathons, on the other hand, involve people from both inside and outside the organisation. They are a specific form of dialogue between the company and its environment.
A hackathon is primarily a tool to support innovation in the company. More than 80% of Fortune 100 companies conduct regular hackathons, which shows that they are a welcome tool for continuous innovation*
* https://www.hackerearth.com/community-hackathons/resources/e-books/guide-to-organize-hackathon/
Copper Giant and the hackathon
At KGHM Polska Miedź S.A., advanced technologies are used on a daily basis. The company sees hackathons as an opportunity to find, among others, innovative solutions and production process improvements. In 2021, the company organised the first edition of the CuValley Hack hackathon as part of the established Copper Valley initiative. After the success of the first edition, the project continues in 2022.
The first edition of the CuValley Hack was held on 11-13 June 2021. At the time, nearly 300 participants signed up and joined together to form 69 teams that ultimately, after 40 hours of coding, submitted 53 projects. The second edition of the CuValley Hack was held in 2022 (11-13 March) and was the result of a very good reception among the participants from the first edition. The second edition attracted 250 participants who joined forces in 60 teams to code for 40 hours, and ultimately produced 40 projects.
Statistics from the 1st edition of the 2021 CuValley hack hackathon.
The daredevils coded continuously for 40h and it took the Mentors and the 25-strong Jury 7 hours to select the submissions. The event prize pool was PLN 100,000!
Statistics from the 2nd edition of the 2022 CuValley hack hackathon
The daredevils coded continuously for 40h and it took the Mentors and the 30-strong Jury 7 hours to select the submissions.The event prize pool was PLN 120,000!
The value offered by the hackathon included the opportunity to work on real industry data and real problems and, most importantly, the prospect of implementation of the projects. CuValley Hack participants focused on data analytics and the use of AI, Machine Learning or BigData in industrial automation systems. Each of the participants could count on the support of a large group of mentors, who supported them at every stage of work on solving the task. The mentors included Company specialists, among others from the Głogów Copper Smelter and Refinery, who deal with the machines involved in the event on a daily basis.
Participants of KGHM hackathons are mostly highly specialized IT specialists, engineers, people who are passionate about coding, programming, and solving data analysis problems. There is also a large group of students from Universities of Technology in the fields of IT, Automation, Artificial Intelligence, Power Engineering, Data Analysis and Big Data, Computer Science and Quantum Engineering.
220
thous. PLN
In both editions of the hackathon, the jury awarded the winners with valuable cash prizes totaling PLN 220,000.
- Programmer
- Software Developer
- Student
- Electrical Engineer
- Data Scientist
- Data Analyst
- Engineer
- Software Engineer
What distinguishes the hackathons organised by KGHM from other events of this type on the Polish market is the aforementioned fact that the winning projects have a real chance for rapid implementation. An example of this is the project of the Data Drivers team, which took first place in the 1st edition of the CuValley Hack hackathon in the task entitled Flash Furnace Stabilization. Just five months after the event, the copper corporation began implementing the innovative solution at the Głogów Copper Smelter and Refinery. For the four young analysts and coders, the CuValley Hack was the beginning of their cooperation with KGHM on the implementation of their proposed solution. After the hackathon, the Data Drivers team was invited to the Głogów Copper Smelter and Refinery in order to learn more about the topics raised in the task. The winners had the opportunity to see first-hand the flash furnace that was the subject of their winning project. After a closer look at the problem, the team members, together with specialists from the Smelter, jointly established the priorities that needed to be focused on in order to effectively implement the project.
Currently, phase I of the project has been completed. Predictive models have been developed and trained using real data from the facility, taking into account data from an extended period of time. The next stage in the project will involve building a tool that will suggest the settings of input parameters and key sensors of the flash furnace in order to optimize the process of heat loss collection in the reaction shaft.
We don’t procrastinate on good projects. When we see the potential and a specific business effect we get down to work. We know that the sum of small but good solutions translates into a better outcome. This is how we build our efficiency and innovation. We organised the CuValley Hack hackathon because we are open to new ideas and we look for innovation. But the greatest success is the fact that we do not shelve these ideas, but implement them and put them into action.
During the hackathons, KGHM looks for solutions with the greatest potential for production implementation and the most innovative approach to solving the problem.
Summary
KGHM Polska Miedź S.A. is an innovative and intelligent enterprise, characterized by creativity, an unconventional approach to problems, able to anticipate the future, and flexible in adapting to the dynamics of the market and its environment. KGHM puts great emphasis on research and development, allocates significant financial resources to it and systematically introduces innovation to its production processes. Hackathons are for KGHM an ideal way to stimulate creativity and obtain ideas to solve key tasks. The organisation of hackathons by KGHM significantly improves the innovation process. It shortens it to a minimum and saves time and effort. Thanks to the organisation of these events, the Company can, in a very short time, obtain solutions ready for implementation and application on a wider scale.
Hackathons are for KGHM an ideal way to stimulate creativity and obtain ideas to solve key tasks. The organisation of hackathons by KGHM significantly improves the innovation process. It shortens it to a minimum and saves time and effort. Thanks to the organisation of these events, the Company can, in a very short time, obtain solutions ready for implementation and application on a wider scale.