Published on: 2026-07-03
Source: Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University –
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Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University became the first university in the city to be awarded the status of “Local Model” under the “Effective Region” program. This means that experts have recognized that processes at the Polytechnic are well-organized and lean manufacturing methods are successfully applied — approaches that help optimize work by eliminating unnecessary time and resource expenditures.
The “Effective Region” program is developing with the support of the State Corporation “Rosatom” and covers more than 40 regions of Russia. It was launched in 2017, based on the experience of the nuclear industry: there, lean management principles have long been used systematically. The main idea of the program is to improve any processes in the work of government bodies or state institutions by eliminating losses and involving all employees in optimization. St. Petersburg joined the project in 2021.
At the Polytechnic, the main site for preparing for the partner quality audit of the sample became the Institute of Industrial Management, Economics, and Trade, where a culture of lean management is actively developed and students and specialists are trained in it. The key implementing unit was the Institute’s Graduate School of Public Administration.
During the visit to the Polytechnic, the commission, which included representatives from the Committee on Industrial Policy, Innovation and Trade of Saint Petersburg, the Committee on Science and Higher Education, the Committee on Government Procurement of Saint Petersburg, and the Saint Petersburg Competence Center of the “Effective Region” program, visited the training laboratory “Modeling of Logistic Systems and Digital Solutions in Management” of the educational and simulation complex “Factory of Production Processes” at the Graduate School of Production Management of IPMEiT. The experts were shown in practice how the university teaches the use of lean manufacturing tools and their practical application.
The commission noted several strengths of the university. Firstly, the Polytechnic actively involves students in real projects — this helps them gain valuable experience immediately. Secondly, the university has become an important city venue for scientific and project events, especially those related to promoting lean thinking. Thirdly, experts highly appreciated specific projects aimed at optimizing internal processes: for example, the implementation of a system for tracking students’ individual achievements and verifying achievements for receiving an increased state academic scholarship (project change leader — N. Yu. Grashchenko), simplifying the paperwork for comprehensive theses and internships (project change leaders — L. V. Pankova and Yu. V. Chizhevskaya), and automating a number of administrative procedures at IPMEiT (project change leader — A. V. Chernikova).
For the university, gaining recognition from the expert community is another important step in expanding forms of interaction with the city’s authorities and implementing new joint projects, believes Dmitry Tikhonov, Vice-Rector for Additional and Pre-University Education at SPbPU, who supervised the preparation for the partner quality audit. According to him, Polytechnic has long been a center of expertise in lean manufacturing, and now its practices have received official confirmation.
The Director of IPM&E&T Vladimir Shchepinin is confident that the experience gained at the university will be useful not only to other universities but also to government authorities. He noted that a modern infrastructure for teaching the principles of lean management has been created at the Polytechnic, and this experience is worth sharing.
The status of “Local sample” is a significant achievement: in Saint Petersburg, among organizations that are not government bodies, only four have received it, and Polytechnic University became the first university on this list. Now the university will be able to participate in the “Effective Region” project at a new level — in particular, to become a partner of the Saint Petersburg State Procurement Committee in the interdepartmental stream “Training contract managers: comprehensive formation of the personnel reserve” at the “Federal+” level.Successful participation of Polytech in the implementation of the project “Contract Manager. The Way for the Young”Over the past two years, it has become the foundation for a set of measures by the Government of Saint Petersburg to develop a professional personnel reserve and create a unified system of continuous education in the field of procurement. Now these developments are planned to be scaled up at the federal level.
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