Globalization, Major Regional Shifts in Demand and Supply Base, Geopolitical Risks, Increased Competition and Other Factors are posing multiple challenges for chemical industries in recent times. As a result, it is time for them to begin the digital transformation of their entire business and shift towards being an intelligent enterprise.

Digital transformation is a journey, and chemical industries have established strategic priorities to help them achieve their goals. This article discusses industry-specific features for the Chemicals Industry offered by RISE with SAP’s Business Transformation Service. Let us begin by defining strategic priorities and their benefits for the Chemicals Industries!

Strategic Priorities for Chemical Industries

To begin the transformation, chemical industries should prioritise examining their entire business model and be prepared for it. Thus, Chemical Industries concentrate on achieving this customer-centric intelligent digital transformation by implementing the four key strategic priorities listed below:

• To Assist sell business outcomes instead of just products
• Simplify to shrink cycle times
• Compete as an ecosystem
• Adopt strategic agility in response to market dynamics

In order to achieve the above-mentioned priorities, it’s time for the chemical industries to reinvent by integrating an intelligent ERP system called RISE with SAP, which enables you to innovate products as well as redesign entire business models and processes.

Adopt strategic agility in response to market dynamics

In today’s competitive environment, more and more businesses are turning to mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures to accelerate portfolio adjustments and diversify into promising new markets or segments. Many such initiatives, however, fail because it takes too long to realise the anticipated synergies and integrate the acquired entities into existing portfolios.

To better understand this, let’s consider there are two businesses namely:

1. Company A uses a non-SAP ERP system
2. Company B uses an SAP-ERP system

As Company A’s entire business structure is governed by a non-ERP system, these were the pain points faced by them:

• The existing system software’s traditional core functionality was limited to post-merger integration.
• The integration of acquisitions such as prebuilt models, integration frameworks and technology was a bit slow.
• There was a need to monitor the synergies which included executive oversight and analysis of key-value drivers.

As a result, insufficient integration of their traditional system resulted in a high involvement of manual processes which made their system function slower than expected.

Now let’s see about Company B, which uses an SAP-ERP system, where:

• Real-time monitoring of financial project KPIs for improved product development decisions.
• During the project staffing process, real-time access to resource availability, skill sets, and organisational assignment.
• Real-time alerts based on resource and production bottlenecks, such as time or component delays were found helpful.
• The “Master Data Governance” application ensures that master data is consistent, up to date and accurate across the enterprise.

Overall, Company B’s Intelligent ERP [RISE with SAP Package] system provides a Closed-loop, E2E process to cover all aspects of mergers, acquisitions and divestitures, from pre-deal evaluation to post-merger integration and divestitures.

Top Value Drivers

The major value drivers in the Chemicals Industry post successful deployment of SAP S/4HANA are:

• Market share had positive growth.
• The synergies were realized.
• Revenue growth has increased a lot.

Now you may be asking, “How can RISE with SAP helps us?”. Here are the primary business capabilities they offer to assist you in reaching your objectives:

• Dynamically adjusts strategy and portfolio in response to market opportunities and needs.
• Expands quickly into new markets or segments and profits from mergers, acquisitions as well as spin-offs.

Conclusion

To summarise, SAP S/4HANA is a one-stop solution that can provide intelligent and industry-specific benefits to the chemical industries through a digital core ERP system that helps them innovate markets and sell products, operate manufacturing plants, maintain assets and build a responsive supply chain.

To know more about how SAP S/4HANA or about other solutions that can help enterprises in chemical industries, do get in touch with us!