I stumbled into the aluminium rather by accident.

My first job in an aluminium smelter:

As I was driving on the highway through the Alps on a snowboarding trip, I passed a large aluminium plant by the little French town Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne. At that time, I was an Erasmus student looking for an industrial internship to finish the final year of my Materials Engineering degree. Later that night, I discovered they were looking for a process engineer intern. I applied to that position and was soon hired to start in February 2018. From the dozen companies I applied at, TRIMET was the only one that gave me the opportunity.

And so began my career as a process engineer at the aluminium smelter of TRIMET France. After the internship, I was offered my first real job as a process engineer at their smelter in Essen, Germany, where I developed control software for the electrolysis process.

Both in my internship and job, a large part of my work consisted of manipulating data. I was very excited about the possibilities that data would unlock. Especially with the advent of machine learning (a subset of AI) that really started to take off at the end of the previous decade with the rise of the data science profession. However, as I would later find out, the problem was not data science – it was data engineering. The latter concerns itself with developing a modern digital infrastructure that enables efficient data science.

Challenges I faced as early-career aluminium professional:

The data infrastructure in the aluminium industry was very old, which made the development of innovative digital solutions extremely difficult. Frustrated with this situation, I decided to switch industries and completely focus my career on data science.

First, as a data science trainee at Statworx, an AI consulting company in Frankfurt. Later, as an independent consultant based in Antwerp, Belgium, offering data services on a contract basis.

Working for various companies in multiple industries, from early-stage startups to large multinationals, I quickly realized that the aluminium industry was decades behind in IT. The industry was not ready for data science – it desperately needed a modernisation of its digital infrastructure, i.e. data engineering.

The challenge turned into an opportunity:

At the beginning of 2022, I was contacted by a headhunter who was recruiting a data engineer for the aluminium rolling and recycling company Novelis. My profile caught his eye because I had both digital skills and aluminium industry experience. I figured this was a great opportunity to move back to Germany, in Berlin, and work on data infrastructure in the aluminium industry. More specifically, I was responsible for transferring process data from rolling mills and cast house furnaces to the cloud.

Near the end of 2022, I discovered Walker Reynolds, a visionary digital expert who coined the term “Unified Namespace”. This was an innovative, modern, digital infrastructure (or rather a philosophy) for the manufacturing industry. With my experience so far, it didn’t take me long to realize that this was the solution this industry desperately needed. To my surprise, I found a German startup called the United Manufacturing Hub that discovered this technology years before I did and built an open-source implementation that they shared with the world.

Unfortunately, there was no opportunity to test the United Manufacturing Hub solution at my then employer. After all, they already had a digital strategy. I was so convinced of the Unified Namespace, that I decided to quit my data engineering job, and start a business in Germany focused on implementing this solution for the aluminium industry.

My learnings and ways to navigate through the aluminium industry:

I learned that the biggest challenges in innovation are never technical. Walker Reynolds taught me that the biggest priority is education: I had to find a way to explain the benefits of the Unified Namespace to the aluminium industry, in a way that they would care. As I was getting nowhere with blogging and newsletters in the past, I tried to give YouTube a shot and started making technical videos about the United Manufacturing Hub.

My aim was to build credibility as an independent data consultant. The company soon noticed my videos and offered to hire me as a freelance Developer Advocate (a person who promotes a product by helping developers implement it at their employers). Since then, I’ve created many videos and blog posts and regularly attend conferences where I present the Unified Namespace to the aluminium industry.

It was a bumpy ride, but I’m grateful for the experience I managed to obtain over the course of just six years. My focus currently lies on identifying a worthwhile problem in the aluminium industry that can be solved effectively with data analytics.

Today, my eye is set on sustainability and decarbonisation.

Potential for future data professions in the aluminium industry

Based on my brief experience, I would say a lot of exciting work remains to be done. It’s undoubtedly frustrating that the aluminium industry is so behind in terms of digital infrastructure. On the flip side, this presents a big opportunity. If there’s one piece of advice I would have given myself, it would be to be more patient. The industry is moving in the right direction – it will just take time. Being part of this digital transformation should prove very exciting for any aspiring data professional.

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About Denis Gontcharov

Denis is a data consultant who helps aluminium manufacturers break down data silos. For the past five years, he has supported the aluminium industry with IT and data services as an independent contractor.

Previously, Denis was employed as a data engineer at Novelis in Germany, a leading aluminium rolling and recycling enterprise, where he played a pivotal role in transferring process data from production machinery to cloud systems. Prior to this, he was employed as a process engineer at TRIMET’s aluminium smelters in France and Germany, developing control software for the electrolysis process. Denis is a graduate in Materials Engineering from KU Leuven, Belgium, and is currently based in Berlin.

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Decoding Data with Denis: In this exclusive AL Circle column, Denis delves into the evolving data management landscape within the ALuminium industry. He explores how manufacturers are actively breaking data silos to integrate information across operations.

Keep an eye out for his column on the future prospects of unified data systems, highlighting their potential to enhance efficiency, decision-making, and innovation throughout the entire ALuminium value chain.