From Obsolete Inventory to Billions: EuroChem Takes Warehouse Management to an Intelligent Level
Obsolete inventory and duplicate equipment can pile up for years in the warehouses of industrial giants. Manually searching hundreds of thousands of items for suitable equivalents is too labor-intensive and imprecise. EuroChem has automated the task with artificial intelligence: its in-house AI system compares technical specifications in seconds and finds suitable alternatives to needed equipment already sitting in company warehouses.
The project began in December 2024. Initial results delivered accuracy of just 10%, prompting the team to analyze gigabytes of SAP data, conduct an inventory and bring in more than 100 employees for verification. By August 2025, model accuracy had reached 85%, and the technology was being used at eight production sites. In 2025, bringing previously idle warehouse inventory back into production generated an economic benefit worth hundreds of millions of rubles, or several million dollars. Once fully scaled across all of the group’s assets, the potential benefit could reach billions of rubles, or tens of millions of dollars, annually.
More Than an Algorithm
The AI rollout became part of a comprehensive inventory management system. EuroChem developed dashboards that track material movements, current warehouse inventories and new purchase requests. Using this data, the system automatically recommends each week that facilities use equipment already available in warehouses instead of buying new items. Meanwhile, the process for identifying equivalents is being integrated into SAP. A separate workstream focuses on accounting for equipment previously absent from the system so it can be returned to the balance sheet without affecting financial reporting.
The project required the company to redesign some business processes and synchronize operations across departments – from procurement and maintenance to finance. The next step is optimizing the materials master data through classification, duplicate removal and digitization of every stage in the movement of inventory and materials, from purchase request through write-off.
AI Supporting Food Security
EuroChem is Russia’s largest mineral fertilizer producer and ranks among the world’s five largest producers by sales volume, with production operations in Asia, Latin America and Europe.
Reliable operations help maintain uninterrupted, affordable fertilizer supplies to agricultural producers, making the company’s production important to food security.
To date, the company has completed more than 60 projects using AI technologies, with about 50 more initiatives under development. Over the past three years, the combined economic benefit from digital products deployed at EuroChem has exceeded 4 billion rubles (about $47 million), with AI technologies underpinning most of these solutions.
A Unified Digital Environment
One key area has been recommendation systems at Russian ammonia plants. They analyze equipment parameters in real time and recommend optimal operating modes. After deployment, unit productivity increased 2%, while natural gas consumption fell 1%.
At the same time, the company is developing digital twins of processing plants to simulate processes and improve raw-material recovery, as well as predictive analytics to prevent unplanned downtime.
In 2025, EuroChem moved its warehouse operations to the unified ant Time Slot Management system, automating vehicle arrival scheduling, loading and warehouse operations. Deploying AI to find equivalent items in inventory takes this digitization to a new level – from managing physical operations to intelligent inventory management.
Another focus is robotizing hazardous areas: EuroChem is testing a robotic dog at its potash facilities and developing an explosion-proof drone. Within its corporate environment, the company has launched the RITM ecosystem for 30,000 employees and is testing internal GPT assistants for document-related tasks.
Digital Technologies for Export
EuroChem’s digital projects have significant prospects in both domestic and international markets. Together with technology partners, the company plans to bring to market a Russian alternative to foreign process simulation systems. The first fully operational solution is expected by the end of 2026, creating the potential to supply the software as a standalone high-tech product to other Russian industrial groups.
Meanwhile, EuroChem is deploying proven digital solutions and AI tools at its international operations in Brazil and Kazakhstan, where the company is actively expanding production capacity.
Digital agronomy services represent another export opportunity. The company offers foreign producers recommendation-based knowledge systems built on accumulated industry expertise as added value alongside fertilizer supplies. Localized platforms such as EuroChem Agro Kazakhstan have already been launched, giving partners access to the company’s expertise through a single interface.
In just a few years, the company’s digital projects have evolved from cost-cutting tools into a technological asset in their own right: EuroChem’s developments are becoming a competitive offering for Russian industrial companies and international partners.
