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.

Assisting Sell business outcomes instead of just products

Chemical companies have traditionally developed products in response to market demands and are influenced by downstream industry sectors such as consumer goods, pharmaceuticals, engineering, and construction. In the near future, they will strive for unprecedented levels of customer experience in the future, anticipating market trends and needs, rapidly developing and manufacturing corresponding formulations and selling those based on business outcomes. These innovative processes are made possible by cutting-edge technologies such as ML, AI, IoT and Blockchain.

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:

• Due to the lack of insights into future trends and continuous needs from the value chain, the R&D process is becoming even more reactive in nature.
• R&D is restricted only to internal knowledge spread across multiple teams and databases as it lacks knowledge of available intellectual property (IP).
• R&D is constrained by time & cost-consuming, sequential lab trials in turn increasing the time to market.
• The inability to respond quickly to changes in regulatory compliance and legislation raises the risk of supply chain disruption which leads to brand damage.

As a result, insufficient integration of their traditional system resulted in a high involvement of manual processes.

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

• Advanced sentiment analysis powered by machine learning assists them in proactively detecting and responding to all emerging trends.
• Companies can maximise reuse and capitalise on the IP of the entire ecosystem by collaborating closely in open innovation networks and establishing a knowledge database supported by machine learning.
• Machine learning simulation as well as prediction of product and formulation of properties along with performance reduces the time to market and time to value.
• Companies can mitigate the risk of supply chain disruption and protect their brand by simulating the ecological footprint of their products throughout their entire lifecycle and the impact of new regulatory requirements on revenue and marketability.

Overall, Company B’s Intelligent ERP [RISE with SAP Package] system provides consolidated data of customers’ information and better product compliance as well as analytics is embedded into core business processes.

Top Value Drivers

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

• Quicker time to market
• Better increase in revenue
• Lower costs
• Greater brand recognition

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:

• Connecting and collaborating with customers as well as suppliers in order to co-innovate, learn about them and become a part of their supply chain.
• Instead of just selling products, the usage of digital technology helps in delivering innovative services involving business outcomes is helpful.

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!