35 years of SAT: Eng. Konstantin Andreev on complex engineering challenges, new technologies and the company’s future – Part I

2026-10-164 min.

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Leading engineering company Systems Automation Technologies – SAT has marked 35 years since its establishment. Thirty-five years is a long time, and so is the list of projects delivered, yet the engineering challenges facing the team continue to become increasingly interesting. Today, the company’s specialists are involved in large-scale modernization projects at industrial plants and take part as early as the site assessment stage. Artificial intelligence is also emerging as a new area of interest, with SAT already exploring how the experience and data accumulated from a completed project could be used in preparing the next one through AI training. We discussed all these topics with Eng. Konstantin Andreev.

Looking at SAT’s work today, which of the company’s recent engineering projects would you highlight as the most interesting?

As the years have progressed and we have accumulated extensive experience across the different areas of our operations, our projects now cover almost the entire range of activities in medium- and low-voltage power distribution and automation across various industrial sectors. Over the past few years, particularly following the COVID-19 pandemic, SAT has delivered a number of interesting projects.

Two of them were particularly challenging, although fundamentally different in nature:

One involved the complete modernization of the electrical distribution and energy management system for the medium-voltage network of a cement plant;
The other, which is still ongoing, involves the complete modernization of the control system of a cement plant.

These are two very different projects, carried out by different teams within the company, but based on a common philosophy and approach to solutions, customers and results.

Projects in which a new solution has to be integrated with existing equipment are particularly interesting, especially when that equipment comes from different generations and manufacturers. What are the most challenging aspects of such implementations, and how do you approach them?

Yes, against the backdrop of aging equipment and legacy solutions at a number of our customers’ plants, such projects are becoming increasingly common and are indeed a major challenge. The main issues faced by SAT’s specialists are the lack of up-to-date documentation and, very often, the complete absence of documentation that could provide us with an accurate picture of the actual situation.