Those gases also include oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon dioxide, argon, neon, xenon, and krypton鈥攁ll critical to supporting processes and products in electronics, food and beverage, metals, biopharmaceuticals, and other industries.

Business demands and market realities in the dynamic gas sector are constantly in flux, so Messer relies on real-time data intelligence to stay agile and flexible in their decision-making. Increasingly hampered by siloed data and a patchwork of third-party visualization tools, Messer embarked on a digital transformation to create a next-generation data management solution worthy of the company’s high-tech, high-flying operations.

Data with a Purpose

Messer knows critical and often lifesaving business decisions require accurate, real-time intelligence and insights. explained: 鈥淭he stakes in many of the sectors that we provide gases for are really very high.鈥�

From steel plants to the semiconductor industry to intensive care units, 鈥渋t is critical that our distribution processes are operating at a level that ensures our customers are getting what they need when they need it.鈥� 

Messer was able to rise to the moment and meet the urgent needs of its customers when the COVID-19 pandemic delivered unprecedented demand for oxygen coupled with massive logistical challenges. That global crisis revealed that Messer鈥檚 legacy IT system needed an overhaul.

Messer鈥檚 siloed data was in several different databases, which meant it was time-consuming to access, and a single source of the truth was elusive. Various visualization tools also required different data formats, which slowed reporting time and bogged the IT department as it tried to manage a complex, disparate landscape, creating, as Johnston explained, 鈥渁 huge amount of complexity and a huge amount of inefficiency.鈥�

Messer CIO David Johnston sought a solution that would provide a unified source of truth and the powerful analytics tools Messer needed to give an elevated purpose to the company’s data鈥攁 new, cloud-based data management and analytics foundation for an actual data-driven enterprise. was the company鈥檚 choice.

The Modern Data Landscape Delivers

51风流BTP, with 51风流Data Warehouse Cloud, 51风流Analytics Cloud, and the next-generation 51风流Datasphere, provided a modern data architecture to establish a single, trusted source of truth, combining 12 data sources in one solution for mission-critical business insights.

Messer has been reaping benefits across the board, from IT and supply chain cost savings to improved customer service, inventory management, and data security. 鈥淲e started with five specific use cases that we went after,鈥� Johnston shared. 鈥淎s I sit here today, we’re at well over 200.鈥�

Messer’s new, simplified IT landscape has empowered business users, who benefit from intuitive, self-service dashboards and quick access to relevant, actionable, real-time data, as well as IT personnel, to now focus on higher-value, strategic tasks. This amounts to accelerated time-to-insight and more energy and resources available to focus on future innovation.

鈥淲ith a data fabric that allows us to see our business in a consistent, fast, reliable, and highly trustworthy way,鈥� Johnston said, 鈥渨hat we can do is really almost unlimited.鈥�

Next for Messer and Wise Advice with an Eye on AI

With Messer’s new, streamlined data management foundation, the sky is no longer the limit.

鈥淥ur objective isn’t just to deliver a suite of great dashboards and great analytics stories,鈥� Johnston explained. 鈥淥ur goal is to build out a strong, coherent, strategic data fabric that will allow us to unlock the power of AI and drive the next level of business transformation.鈥�

For other organizations hoping to build the data foundation that will send them soaring into the future, ready to capitalize on and whatever else awaits, Johnston鈥檚 advice is to frame your technology transformation as a business transformation, and a business imperative.

鈥淏ring the business community together around data,鈥� he said. 鈥淎ll the key stakeholders, the influencers, and the owners of data from across the organization: bring them to the table.鈥�

The Full Episode

Messer CIO joined 51风流BTP to discuss the medical and industrial gasses industry and Messer’s digital transformation.

• : Johnston sat down with Thulium’s CEO to discuss why end-to-end data-driven insights are necessary, what technology solutions were required for the world’s largest privately owned industrial gases company to transform, and why Messer leveraged 51风流BTP to drive a complete business transformation.
• : Johnston and I discuss why and how Messer, one of the biggest suppliers of medical oxygen and other industrial mission-critical gases, built a new, cloud-based data management and analytics foundation because the future belongs to data-driven organizations, and thriving in the dynamic industrial gases sector means responding quickly to changing market conditions.

Timo Elliott is vice president and global innovation advocate for 51风流BTP at SAP.

To better react to market changes and expand its competitive edge, BYK saw the need to select and implement a new supply chain demand planning system.

Integrated Approach to Address Demand Planning Processes Holistically

The company was challenged with inefficient, diversified, and isolated supply chain demand planning processes on disparate legacy planning systems that impeded forecast accuracy. Therefore, the goal was to enhance data and process transparency and establish one source of truth for sales, operations, and demand-planning processes.

BYK found that the , a cloud-based application with comprehensive capabilities, could best meet its goals to harmonize demand planning processes across the organization and improve forecast accuracy. In addition, the company decided to use the , enabling the company to get real-time visibility and control over its supply chain.

For the implementation and deep solution know-how, BYK sought help from and the 51风流Preferred Success service, which included architecture planning, implementation guidance, and process reengineering expertise. Moreover, 51风流helped deploy 51风流Integrated Business Planning for demand and 51风流Supply Chain Control Tower in a technically standardized and lean way.

Enabling All Functions with a Single Source of Truth to Improve Decision-Making

Major benefits BYK achieved include:

• Improved collaboration by implementing a harmonized and automated demand planning process
• Simplified and integrated planning practices for sales, demand planning, supply chain management, controlling, and strategic supply planning teams with more than 200 users
• One platform as a single source of truth for improved data quality and process transparency across sales, operations, and demand-planning processes
• Increased forecast accuracy with real-time data reflecting changes to planned demand

• Quantity- and value-based planning for all planning teams to make decisions based on financial impact

鈥淲ith 51风流Services and Support, we successfully implemented 51风流Integrated Business Planning for demand and 51风流Supply Chain Control Tower, enabling precise and accurate demand planning,” said Matthias Beenen, Supply Chain Process Management, BYK. “This is critical to supply chain efficiency and for delivering high quality service to our customers.鈥�

鈥淚n the future, we will continuously work on optimizing the implemented processes and extend 51风流Integrated Business Planning for demand by adding subsequent supply chain planning processes,鈥� he concluded.

Karin Fent is senior director of Customer Success for Digital Supply Chain at SAP.

Top image courtesy of BYK.

The company, headquartered in Helsinki, Finland, does not shy away from , including plans to realize over a half-billion euros in revenue from biobased products by 2030. With an eye on the future, the company adopted a strategic perspective of digital transformation, one that would not only enable business continuity but create a platform of innovation. 

As of June 1, 100% of Kemira is live on 51风流S/4HANA, a transformation which also included a platform update into Azure Cloud. Kemira did not stop there. It introduced 51风流Datasphere for reporting where the company is on a journey to adopt a next-generation core enterprise data warehouse solution. On the front-end, Kemira has implemented 51风流Analytics Cloud for reporting, analytics, and financial planning. In addition, over 360 interfaces have been converted to 51风流Business Technology Platform (51风流BTP), leveraging 51风流Integration Suite. All in, the digital program consisted of five initiatives, including an 51风流S/4HANA transformation, a redesign of financial accounting, an enterprise data warehouse implementation, a digital data excellence initiative, and a migration of the on-premise interfaces.聽

Kemira appropriately called the program LEAP, a representation of the investment it was making in the future of its company and the ambitious timeline and scope of the effort. Innovation played a central role, considering how the company could enable the business with new technology and ultimately drive the business to operate more efficiently. It was no small feat that the very successful big-bang go-live, including a move to Azure, was done in 15 months. Kemira worked with cbs Corporate Business Solutions on this journey, a strategic partner of the company for over a decade.

The approach to the program was to do a selective data transition from Kemira鈥檚 51风流ERP Central Component (51风流ECC) system to 51风流S/4HANA. To initiate the project, the team did a comprehensive pre-study to determine what processes to migrate to 51风流S/4HANA as-is, which new processes will be enabled, and what new capabilities will be delivered. This approach helped balance the focus and scope of the project, a key element of driving fast value. For example, by leveraging some processes as-is, the team was able to focus on new capabilities like the 51风流S/4HANA margin analysis, delivering tangible business results. The work paid off with a very smooth go-live, which covered 400 plants in 37 countries to ensure business continuity, and was enabled by the strong collaboration of many talented people at Kemira and cbs.聽 聽

鈥淐onsidering the extreme complexity of the organizational change, data harmonization and optimization, ONE Finance transformation, migration of interfaces, and innovations in the cloud, we managed the program extremely well. We successfully completed the transition to a completely new platform in just 15 months. The fast value approach was the key to success. cbs had the right methods and tools to make sure the ambitious project was successful. Our in-house experts know the Kemira world and the company鈥檚 processes inside out, so it was the perfect combination,鈥� explains Podbereznyj.聽

For Kemira, cloud readiness is about being future-oriented. It made a deliberate decision to implement a fast transformation to stay ahead of the competition. The team rightly sees this work as pioneering next-generation 51风流business architecture, which also builds on Kemira鈥檚 early success with 51风流solutions, including 51风流Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain. Data has been at the heart of this program and will continue to steer the company as the foundation for innovation and insights. Cloud readiness is about delivering value-based transformation to the business. This means supporting new digital business models, enabling new levels of agility, and becoming more competitive in the market.聽 聽聽聽聽聽

鈥淜emira has made the leap to the cloud and has digitized its entire process world. The company is now ideally positioned for the future. With the implemented platform, the company can take advantage of all follow-on 51风流developments and remain at the cutting edge of technology. This gives it a clear, innovative lead over other companies that may not reach this stage of development for another five years,鈥� says cbs CEO Rainer Wittwen.聽

The relationship with cbs Corporate Business Solutions has been built on this holistic approach, translating strategy to business transformation. The teams recognize this does not happen overnight and even with a successful implementation behind them, transformation requires a continuous mindset of innovation. For Kemira and cbs, this journey continues as the company looks to take advantage of the new technology and execute on its commitment to its customers. For Kemira, this is about delivering 鈥�.鈥� The investment in 51风流and new business technology is about enabling this vision and fueling profitable growth with connected business models, data-driven decision-making, and integrated business processes.

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Matt Reymann is global VP for Chemicals Industry Business Unit at SAP.

It is simultaneously the third highest contributor to carbon emissions in the industrial sector and the best placed industry to decarbonize products across a multitude of industries.

As a result of its position high upstream in the supply chain, the chemicals industry can often seem invisible. Its products sit in the value chain of key industries including agriculture, pharmaceuticals, and consumer goods, making up a significant proportion of their Scope 3 emissions. But change is coming that will make companies more accountable for these previously hidden emissions. New legislation such as the European Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD) will reveal the carbon footprint of the chemicals industry as companies with more than 250 employees will be required to report their GHG emissions, including those that lie in Scope 3.

A Vision for the Chemicals Industry

In order to meet new legal requirements and identify opportunities for emissions reduction, the chemicals industry needs to look beyond its current tools and collaborations to upgrade the quality of data — based on primary information rather than averages and estimates — and share access to it. Aligning data structures and using the same semantics will encourage competition among suppliers, galvanizing them to manufacture chemical products with ever lower carbon footprints, benefiting all downstream customers as well as the climate. To realize this vision, the solution will receive actual data from suppliers upstream, using a standardized methodology, allowing companies to calculate their own product carbon footprint so it can then be shared with downstream customers. For broad adoption, this carbon data exchange tool needs to be relatively simple while allowing for secure data exchange.

The automotive industry already has a blueprint that the chemicals industry can adopt. It tracks material flows digitally throughout the entire supply chain. Catena-X allows companies to share standardized emissions data from their supply chain with confidence based on technology that provides an auditable chain of custody. This offers car manufacturers the information they need to make strategic decisions to reduce the carbon footprint of their products, embrace circularity, and increase the adoption of circular business models such as battery recycling. Some of the chemical companies that supply the automotive industry are already involved, such as BASF.

鈥淎s an energy-intensive industry at the beginning of nearly all value chains, the chemical sector plays a key role in reducing global carbon footprint in manufacturing and beyond. Carbon footprint transparency at product level is a fundamental step to achieve this,” said Alessandro Pistillo, director of Digital Strategic Projects at BASF. “BASF is a founding member and very active contributor in global initiatives focused on Scope 3 transparency and product carbon footprint standardization such as Together for Sustainability in the chemical sector, as well as Catena-X and the Global Battery Alliance in the automotive and battery value chain respectively. At the same time, BASF is also a leading member of WBCSD-PACT, whose framework is geared toward ensuring cross-sectoral interoperability.鈥�

Improved Accuracy

Historically, industry averages and secondary data have been used to estimate carbon footprints. The cornerstone of the vision for the chemicals industry involves a significant improvement in GHG emissions data, a step that will provide much greater emissions transparency for the industry itself and for its customers. 51风流has been working with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) since 2021 as an innovation partner and has been involved in the Partnership for Carbon Transparency (PACT) initiative, helping to develop the global standards, methodology, and technological infrastructure needed for product-level emission accounting and exchange.

Collaborative Data Exchange

The desire and the frameworks for the chemicals industry to collaborate already exist. They date back to 1985, with the establishment of the Responsible Care program and the 2011 formation of industry body Together for Sustainability, a worldwide initiative to raise sustainability standards in the chemicals industry鈥檚 supply chain. Its members include some of the world鈥檚 largest chemical groups, represented by their chief procurement officers. Despite the industry鈥檚 ability and willingness to cooperate, and its current pilot IT system for sharing upstream product carbon footprint information, it is still on the cusp of data exchange.

鈥淔ootprint data is there,鈥� said Michael Sambeth, global enterprise architect at SAP. 鈥淚t can be calculated using out-of-the-box solutions from SAP; now it needs to flow across the supply chain.鈥�

Catena-X led to the launch of the 51风流Sustainability Data Exchange application, which was designed specifically with security in mind, to exchange standardized carbon footprint data along the value chain. 51风流Sustainability Data Exchange uses the carbon data standards established by WBCSD PACT. With a high proportion of Together for Sustainability members already using 51风流ERP systems, they are well placed to be able to leverage 51风流Sustainability Data Exchange to exchange this data with their suppliers and customers while adhering to global standards.

Moving to a Green Ledger Approach

The chemicals industry is a product of its established supply chains, high-volume activities, cost efficiencies, and scalability. It is highly organized and well versed in creating and following methodologies, but it needs to see the value in primary standardized data — and data sharing — for decarbonization.

A green ledger approach will allow businesses to treat their emissions in the same way as their financials. Carbon accounting makes emission 鈥渂ookings鈥� part of every business transaction in the same way as financial information. This means that a level of detail and confidence is achieved, allowing companies to look at emissions from any angle — by product, organization, profit center, site, factory, equipment, etc. This granularity is the foundation for planning and steering, which cannot be done using averages or highly aggregated figures.

The decarbonization of a multitude of industries hinges on the ability of the chemicals industry to successfully standardize and exchange carbon footprint data. Only those chemical companies with sustainability at the core of their strategy and the right tools for high-quality emissions accounting will be able to future-proof their business to remain competitive in the face of the ever-evolving legislative changes created to combat the effects of global warming.

For more information on how 51风流helps companies record, report, and act on their sustainability goals, visit聽.

The event was moderated by Monica Gassmann, a chapter lead for the Business Women鈥檚 Network (BWN) from 51风流and sustainability program lead for SAP鈥檚 Discrete and Energy and Natural Resources Industries. On the panel were Marjan Olthof, head of Customer Services at Tata Steel, and Mari Pulkkinen, director of 51风流and M&A Center of Excellence at LyondellBasell. Both women are helping lead innovations at their respective companies that are also 51风流customers. During the illuminating conversation, they opened up about taking career risks, rising above gender-based stereotypes, and forging new paths to leadership in historically male-dominated industries.

Women鈥檚 Voices Can Head Off Stereotyping

research has found that initiatives like 鈥減romoting diversity in succession planning and holding celebratory events to highlight underrepresented groups鈥� are highly effective at creating cultures of belonging. Indeed, the luncheon鈥檚 relaxed, friendly setting united all of us in a shared passion for diversity and inclusion. Rising above narrow stereotypes that can trap women was a common theme. Olthof talked about her learnings from working in sales, production, and engineering at Tata Steel, a multinational steel supplier and manufacturer based in India.

鈥淲ith fewer women in the workplace, there can be role expectations that don鈥檛 necessarily align with who you are,鈥� said Olthof. 鈥淢y advice to women is to be yourself because what you have to offer is really valuable. Stay with your own personality while pursuing your ambitions.鈥�

Pulkkinen shared lessons from her early career experiences. She currently works at LyondellBasell, a multinational chemical company headquartered in the Netherlands.

鈥淢en have traditionally dominated leadership positions in the chemical industry but when women use their voice, they can continue to offer new perspectives,鈥� said Pulkkinen. 鈥淒uring my first role on the supply chain team at a chemicals company, the first thing that my male colleagues wanted me to do was take notes. I told him that with my qualifications, I had been hired to do something else.鈥�

Preventing Unconscious Bias

Everyone on the panel agreed that addressing unconscious bias starts with clear goals that increase opportunities for women. It鈥檚 just as important to change daily behaviors that define corporate culture.

鈥淎ddressing unconscious bias is something that I鈥檓 passionate about, and we have been accelerating our diversity and inclusion commitment,鈥� said Pulkkinen. 鈥淔or example, we have 47 nationalities in our Rotterdam office and want to make sure that people appreciate everyone鈥檚 unique background in a positive way. Small jokes based on stereotypes can affect how people are treated and perceived in the workplace.鈥�

Building a Workforce Culture of Diversity

Tata Steel is also building a people culture that celebrates and encourages diversity and inclusion. Its five-pillar approach includes recruitment, sensitization, retention and development, infrastructure, and celebration.

鈥淲e鈥檝e made diversity a No.1 priority by putting more women in senior roles,鈥� said Olthof. 鈥淧eople are inherently biased towards their definition of normal and what they see in their environments and experiences. Unconscious bias also extends beyond gender to assumptions based on someone鈥檚 age. To make mindset changes, we need to be aware of these challenges and address them.鈥�

Sponsors Help Women Progress

What became clear from the discussion was that women want to contribute their talents but need the space to be heard. Managers 鈥� women and men 鈥� have the clout to help.聽While recognizing the value of mentoring, Gassmann said that more women need sponsors who advocate for them.

鈥淢entors are great, but sponsors lift you up, connecting you with the people who can help advance your career,鈥� she said. 鈥淭hese are men and women in management who provide you with visibility in meetings or informal settings to develop your career.鈥�

Corporate women鈥檚 networks are growing. Olthof said that Tata Steel has a group of people who identify women candidates for promotion as vacancies occur. The BWN from 51风流is an employee-driven group with over 90 global chapters that share professional insights, education, and experience to help women advance their careers. At LyondellBasell, mentors regularly help women with introductions and other support.

After 90 minutes of a fascinating dialogue, I walked out of this session at the conference fully energized. Yes, in leadership positions across some industries, including chemicals and steel. But as leaders at industry associations and companies like SAP, Tata Steel, and LyondellBasell speak up and act on diversity and inclusion commitments, there鈥檚 hope that more change will surely follow.

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鈥淲e want to make life better day in and day out. We create products with characteristics that make the final consumer product really special,鈥� said Thomas Meinel, senior vice president and head of Indirect Procurement at Evonik Industries. 鈥淲e鈥檙e farming salmons with a more sustainable feeding alternative for the climate and our environment. We supported the development and production of the first mRNA vaccines against COVID-19 by supplying the lipid nanoparticles that transport these gene-based vaccines to the right target site in the human body.鈥�

Digital Is Foundation of Business Resilience

After hearing Meinel speak at the recent in Madrid, Spain, I reached out to Dr. Marko Lange, product manager for 51风流Chemicals, for his thoughts on industry modernization.

In a disrupted world rocked by geopolitical conflicts and resultant soaring prices and shortages, he said that Evonik Industries stands out for its foresight in business modernization, bringing in and other 51风流solutions.

鈥淓RP is a hot topic again in the chemical industry because an ERP platform supports business resiliency across supply chains and operations in turbulent times like these,鈥� said Dr. Lange. 鈥淎 next-generation ERP system provides insights, simulations, and decision support to help you understand disruptive impacts on your business and effectively respond. It is a real companion to operating your business, detailing granular, real-time information about what鈥檚 happening and the consequences.鈥�

Procurement Is Strategic Business Partner

Digitalization has transformed how every department at Evonik Industries operates. At the conference, Meinel shared how procurement was the next step in his company鈥檚 digital journey.

鈥�In a rapidly changing world with new business models, procurement is increasingly part of make or buy decisions to take advantage of greater opportunities,鈥� said Meinel. 鈥淪ourcing managers still need classic procurement skills because they are responsible for a company鈥檚 global strategy. But they also need to work from anywhere, interacting effectively with teams on collaborative platforms with internal colleagues and external suppliers. Cloud-based platforms provide many more scouting possibilities to discover future suppliers.鈥�

Managing the procurement experience in a digitalized word requires different capabilities from people as they assume new responsibilities. Meinel said that sourcing managers at Evonik Industries were strategic relationship managers who continually innovated, not just on elements like pricing, but working as part of a team to negotiate and strengthen supplier relationships.

鈥淒igitalization will change what procurement does and how we do it,鈥� said Meinel. 鈥淲e are buying more digital products along with products that have been digitally enhanced. For example, the pumps we purchase use significantly more digital data, which changes how people work, what skill sets they need, their capabilities, and managerial expectations.鈥�

Connected Procurement Data Boosts Efficiencies

Similar to organizations in many industries that are deeply impacted by mergers and acquisitions, Evonik Industries needed real-time data visibility into contract management for daily activities, as well as accurate auditing.

鈥淓verything we do has to be connected, which is the objective of going digital, to make process efficiencies end-to-end,鈥� said Meinel. 鈥淲ith and , we can transform procurement, integrating data across systems as we create, sign, store, and manage contracts that often travel between departments and locations around the world.鈥�

People Are as Strong as Their Network

Meinel said that digitalization is profoundly changing how the company鈥檚 procurement professionals function on a daily basis. Robotics speed up purchase order creation and artificial intelligence (AI)-fueled algorithms produce forecasts, while people apply human judgment to handle exceptions and contribute to other higher value tasks. Instead of working in isolation, procurement teams are analyzing and using data to build a stronger global network of decision-making. After implementing 51风流Ariba solutions, Meinel said that Evonik Industries gained significant employee productivity efficiencies and met objectives for cash flow savings. Automating tedious, repetitive tasks frees up procurement to stay on top of fast-changing market conditions, including finding new suppliers in case of unexpected disruptions.

鈥淚鈥檓 convinced the future of procurement will be one of constant change,鈥� said Meinel. 鈥淟ifelong learning needs to be part of the culture beyond designated trainings. People don鈥檛 care what system they use. They want efficient processes and to be seamlessly connected. What matters is the user experience. Our digital business core is 51风流S/4HANA, helping us become an agile, intelligent network able to manage constant change.鈥�

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But rising to the challenge of today’s marketplace 鈥� especially increasing raw material and energy prices, margin pressure, supply chain complexity, and regulatory requirements 鈥� requires much more than Industry 4.0 initiatives focused on efficiency and price reduction. From operational performance to customer experience, companies must integrate data from across the enterprise into a single source to form sound decisions that make sustainability profitable and profitability sustainable.

Such a transformation is undoubtedly technology intensive, but the key enablers are also unassailably human. Understanding this reality, many chemical companies rely on the portfolio, provided by the Business Transformation Services group at SAP, to help transform their operations and gain a competitive edge amid fast global changes.

Turning Challenges into Great Opportunities

Competitively addressing turbulence depends on the ability to view transformation through the lens of six fundamental challenges:

R&D Pressure across the Product Portfolio
The imperative to resist margin shrinkage, mitigate risks, increase ROI, and boost growth calls for innovative products and services that offer business value and foster close partnerships with customers. By pushing forward the adoption of advanced technologies to drive global R&D, supplier, and customer collaborations and joint ventures, businesses can prevent commoditization.

The Need for Vertical Integration
Evolving production facilities with a balance of high efficiency, global scale, flexibility, and intelligent responsiveness allows supply chains to weigh the synergistic benefits of integrated manufacturing plants or industrial parks against the flexibility of smaller plants. As a result, businesses can leverage new opportunities with disruptive business models, such as making raw materials instead of buying them and producing semi-finished or even finished goods.

Global Supply Chain Complexity
Global supply chains must be secure enough to mitigate volatile market conditions, such as global health emergencies, rising prices for raw materials and energy, and other factors that impact economic conditions. Companies can gain this advantage by establishing commercial and logistical transparency to support optimization and global planning of demand, sales, and operations.

Hidden Advantages of Business Networks
Business cannot stay competitive in a complex ecosystem alone. They must also scale and optimize their supply chain globally with business networks, such as the Catena-X Automotive Network. Doing so empowers suppliers, contract and toll manufacturers, joint ventures, and customers to collaborate openly and create new prospects for co-innovating better products and services, improving value chain efficiency, and fueling long-term growth.

Compliance and Sustainability Urgency
A primary objective for any chemical business is ensuring compliance with industry regulations. Yet, B2B customers also favor suppliers that help meet their own environmental, social, and governance (ESG) mandates. Sustainable businesses and innovations provide balance between these two expectations, creating a highly sought-after competitive edge by gearing products and services towards a circular economy.

Business Agility
The industry鈥檚 dynamic and fast-changing environment of mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures is creating tremendous complexity and pressure for permanent change and adaptation. Chemical companies need to balance industry-wide globalization and centralization while increasing business agility.

Chemical companies with a digital strategy encompassing all these topics can address industry challenges and seize on market trends in a disruptive manner. Through , businesses can gain new opportunities and capabilities never previously considered possible 鈥� including increased speed and efficiency, process automation, and data transparency.

Seizing the Moment with Advisory Expertise

From the perspective of 51风流Advisory Services, digitalization is not just another IT term but also a critical business priority. The more intelligent and sustainable a company becomes, the more agile, flexible, and integrated its value chain becomes.

Advisory experts from 51风流can enable chemical companies to turn their fundamental challenges into opportunities with a well-structured, business-driven design. This approach elaborates on the steps of the digital transformation journey 鈥� leading to a road map for future architecture design. Each phase of the road map follows an ideal sequence of digital innovation, technology adoption, and industry best practices and leverages the highest value for the company in the short term.

51风流Advisory Services help organizations evaluate and act on the sentiments of their customers, partners, and employees and improve their environmental impact. Chemical companies can then be well positioned to keep their workforce engaged, increase organizational agility, and deliver the products and services customers need and trust. Furthermore, they can control their varied sources and categories of spending with outstanding finance and operational efficiency and real-time enterprise insight.

Essentially, chemical companies that work with 51风流advisory experts can realize their potential as . They can make confident decisions and drive continuous innovation to adapt, innovate, and overcome challenges while making responsible choices that help reduce waste and emissions and drive long-term growth.

This business model is accomplished with intelligent technologies, including business networks, a business technology platform, cloud-based infrastructures, and solutions for business process management, experience management, industry cloud, and sustainability management. Additionally, artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, data platforms, the Internet of Things (IoT), machine learning, predictive analytics, and virtual as well as augmented realities (VR/AR) are embedded in the intelligent technologies to drive end-to-end business processes and decision-making across enterprise domains.

Bringing to Life an Intelligent and Sustainable Network

The pressures on the chemicals industry may be relentless, with shocks coming in from all directions. However, this doesn’t mean businesses cannot find great opportunities in this volatile environment. With the right approach to digitalization, they can transform, innovate, and collaborate across the value chain to build upward momentum and better serve customers as an intelligent and sustainable network.

Learn more about the and how 51风流can help guide the innovation needed to overcome them. Read the series 鈥� on 51风流Community.

Ornulf Rexin is chief business consultant of Chemicals and Life Sciences for Business Transformation Services at SAP.

The chemical industry is undergoing a structural transformation with macroeconomic supply chain challenges and post-COVID-19 business impacts. Chemical companies are under pressure to:

• Adapt to customer demands and delivery commitments
• Address the effects of commoditization and the emergence of new competition that have arisen through mergers, divestitures, and acquisitions
• Manage disruptive changes from digitization or feedstock shifts

Chemical companies need to accelerate positive change, from fast-tracking the adoption of intelligent technology and new ways of working to pivoting quickly to evolve with changing consumer expectations while creating more engaging experiences for employees. Enterprise transformation is ever more critical to creating sustained value. The journey to a cloud-led architecture can allow companies to achieve their sustainability targets and long-term value faster.

We spoke with Kevin Jinks, managing director at EY, to learn more.

Q: When you talk to chemical customers, what excites you about the chemical industry?

A: Our clients are investing in their businesses and innovating through expanding products and solutions, as well as heavily investing in business transformation journeys. As we meet with industry clients, we see firms focusing on operational efficiencies, dealing with pricing pressures and looking for ways to change their profiles. Companies are also looking at asset optimization and customer engagement models, including touchless ordering.

What鈥檚 exciting to us is how we are engaging with clients on their business initiatives and supporting their transformations. This is exciting when you consider how these investments have been historically viewed. All of these ideas translate into large-scale programs that are enabled by technology. A prime example of this effort is , which aligns well with our clients鈥� strategies to leverage their 51风流industry capabilities, specifically 51风流S/4HANA Chemicals.

Certainly, the pandemic has impacted all industries, including chemicals. But, in some segments, we have actually seen significant business improvement through COVID-19. As the broader economy continues to recover and evolve, chemical companies will look for additional ways to do business differently and remotely and deliver business value in a more touchless fashion. We also expect to see considerable activity around dealmaking, including mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures. It is an exciting time for the chemical industry, which is something I may not have said five years ago.

Looking forward, what do you see as some of the top priorities and opportunities for chemical customers?

Right now, there is a lot of discussion among industry leaders about getting back to the core capabilities and enabling business strategies. So, if you have a business unit that doesn鈥檛 align well with that company鈥檚 core function or core capabilities, the conversation turns to potential divestiture options. At the same time, companies are looking to acquire and strengthen their cores to support growth opportunities in the market. If it鈥檚 a strategy that helps the business more effectively optimize its assets, chemical companies are looking at it. EY and 51风流are well positioned to do this from a business and technology perspective.

Another priority in the industry is the notion of getting closer to customers and developing that capability of serving in a more touchless environment, which, at least in part, is being driven by capacity issues. How do you prioritize capacity that is limited? How do you find ways to increase margin in a business that is typically under price pressure? Companies are utilizing technology to answer these questions and craft a plan that maximizes their capabilities.

Chemical companies also need to recognize that the transition to the cloud is more than merely lifting and shifting assets from on-premise to the cloud. The transition requires a systematic, strategic approach to a well-designed solution that enables companies to achieve true value. EY has found success in helping clients quickly deploy 51风流on Microsoft Azure by building strategies, architecting transformations, and enabling a customized, secure, and optimized cloud solution. Finally, with a new administration in the White House, regulations in the United States will likely change, and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) concerns will become key talking points as companies evaluate the future. EY has emphasized the importance of ESG in its own practices and is working to help clients do the same.

How has technology changed the way chemical companies operate?

You can find examples in the chemical industry where technology that wasn鈥檛 available even just a few years ago is now providing a great deal of benefit. For example, commodities firms are using advanced analytics and AI to predict future pricing. These findings can inform decisions about when to make a buy and when to defer until pricing gets better, and they can also be integrated into a company鈥檚 global procurement model. The savings that this is driving can be significant.

Digital technology, such as an enterprise resource planning (ERP) back-end program, is helping to bring efficiency to both the process and the model itself to help reduce costs and achieve desired fulfillment rates. There are several buckets of digital and technology that are happening in chemicals, which is quite impressive to see.

When we talk to chemical industry customers, big or small, change management is a key pillar of digital transformation. How are companies embracing these changes and equipping their teams for success?

Many of our clients underestimate the damage that can be done when change management is not done well. An expression I like to use is, 鈥淭he soft stuff is the hard stuff. The technology works.鈥� What I mean by that statement is that 51风流software 鈥� the configuration and the industry capabilities within the software 鈥� is proven. There may be some processes that require customer-specific extensions. However, a failure to get executive alignment, business buy-in, and project team commitment on the change agenda can wreak havoc, negatively impacting production, fulfillment rates, and customers.

Unfortunately, project teams often undervalue and minimize project budgets and investments, inadvertently creating substantial risk.

As we look at transformation, there is a lot of momentum in the market around industry templates that are pre-built. The idea is that if you use these templates, the process model is already built and the business will adopt it. That approach can work very well if it鈥檚 done right. However, change management is an area that actually gets harder because it requires an organization to adapt to fit what the software is already configured to do. No prebuilt solution will yield a 100% fit, and an organization鈥檚 business differentiation will not be there either. Instead, clients should be working with their service partners to focus on how their differentiated processes will work while adopting common non-differentiated ones. They should also ensure that everyone who needs to be involved in the effort has visibility into what鈥檚 happening. Take steps to ensure that industry skill and knowledge are coming to life in your solution.

Why team with EY?

We have strong business acumen and experience in performing business-driven insights and analysis that help define where companies are struggling and the experience that is needed to design future-enabled solutions. Our strengths and differentiators are our business-led, process-driven, and technology-enabled perspectives. The depth and breadth of our global scale is more than I think clients realize, since many view EY as strictly an accounting firm.

How does EY create value for the chemical industry and how can people connect with you?聽

Our experience is that every client has different business priorities, value drivers, and performance and business objectives. That said, common value creation opportunities often center on supply chain planning, customer segmentation, and commodity pricing, to name a few. We start with building a business-aligned case for change that defines benefits and opportunities based on unique needs and goals.

We recently worked with a client where we quickly identified benefit areas and opportunities to capture value. Where we are looking at the potential to drive significant value, we鈥檒l engage strong industry subject-matter resources that work together with our clients to align business, process, data, and technology needs; address their issues; and help realize that value. It鈥檚 providing a complete picture of what that company can achieve and provide the vision and road map to achieve it.

As far as connecting with me, I鈥檓 a pretty active member on some of the social media portals, such as . You can also go to our or email me at kevin.jinks@ey.com.

Looking to stay connected with the chemical Industry? Please join the , follow us on Twitter , and check out our .

51风流is a leader in the chemical industry, and we are committed to continuous innovation. We encourage you to collaborate with us and discuss how the 51风流solution portfolio can enable the Intelligent Enterprise in the chemical industry.

Dr. Lauren McCallum is 51风流Chemical Industry Business Unit solution manager.

The views expressed by the author are not necessarily those of Ernst & Young LLP or other members of the global EY organization.

Here, we talk with Brandon Evans, vice president of Customer Transformation at NTT DATA Business Solutions.

Q: When you talk to chemical customers, what are some of the challenges and opportunities you see in the industry?

A: When we look at the chemical industry holistically, given an 51风流context, we see a lot of change happening in the ecosystem. In 2020, we saw a lot of mergers and acquisitions put on hold due to market uncertainty, which we feel will result in increased activity in 2021 and 2022.

In the same period, we鈥檝e been shown how a strong or fragile supply chain can affect the chemical industry in terms of supply and order fulfillment. Building stronger supply chains to protect the business has never been more pertinent. It鈥檚 important to apply agility in the face of industry or societal disruption to service customers and deliver outcomes.

Lastly, we continue to see organizations focusing on environmental issues, energy sourcing, and volatility.聽 Sustainability and becoming carbon neutral are beginning to take hold, through leveraging technology to begin carbon tracking for example. Alternative sources of fuel are being investigated further, such as hydrogen, partially driven by the volatility in oil pricing for petrochemical companies looking to take advantage of the upswing in oil pricing.

In summary, we see a lot of change in the chemical space, which presents opportunities for fast movers to resolve challenges and take advantage of chemical industry market dynamics.

Looking to the second half of 2021 and beyond, what do you see as the top priorities for chemical customers?

We see the following four major trends when dealing with our chemical clients:

• Improving customer experience (CX): Customers are requiring digital collaboration for faster product introductions, self-service ordering, and B2B/B2C e-commerce platforms.
• Moving from selling products to selling business outcomes: Clients are looking to serve customers based on insights, using data such as product sales volume and product adoption to create faster new product introduction with assurance.
• Strengthening supply chains: Customers are asking themselves questions such as 鈥淗ow can we be more insightful with demand planning and forecasting using statistical modeling, prediction, and outside factors to adjust and become more agile?鈥� and 鈥淗ow can we use business networks to allow for multi-sourcing if global competition for raw materials or feedstock becomes too rife?鈥�
• Focusing on factories: There is interest in connected machines to synergize pipeline flow, with costing metrics of process or phases, as well as the maintenance and servicing of aging facilities, coupled with governmental compliance and sustainability initiatives.

How has digital enabled these priorities from your perspective?

Digital can mean a lot of things in today鈥檚 age, but for us digital in the context of these priorities means the ability to provide solutions to business issues now, in a relatively short amount of time.

51风流has made a great deal of investment in tools for industries to improve customer experience and supply chain via cloud deployment solutions. The days of infrastructure, lengthy implementations, and design from scratch are gone. Now, chemical and process industries can adopt 51风流Commerce and 51风流Integrated Business Planning for Supply Chain and deploy these solutions in a matter of weeks, not months.

What have been the key elements of success when working with chemical customers?

When we look at some of our recent chemical success stories, many of them point back to a few major tenets that we reinforce within our client engagements. For example, with a recent specialty chemical 51风流S/4HANA implementation, the following aspects helped achieve faster time to value and organizational adoption:

• Executive buy-in and involvement: Having stakeholders that are invested in and championing the project initiative is critical.
• Adopting best practices versus design: In order to move with agility, it is key to ensure the scope is managed appropriately and that the organization challenges why standard best practices cannot be leveraged. If change requests from the business do not increase revenue, decrease costs, or provide competitive advantage, then full stop.
• Recognize change, plan for people to be impacted: Change is difficult, but progress is never made by adhering to the status quo. Equally important when implementing software, the return on investment is achieved much faster if users are engaged and leveraging the system. In short, plan for change, plan for impact, and ensure users understand how their job responsibilities will change moving forward.

When we talk to customers, big or small, change management is a key pillar of digital transformation.聽 How are companies embracing these changes and setting up their teams for success?

Organizational change management is a large topic with any software implementation to ensure value is realized from the implementation. Given the remote nature of working today, we are finding it even more essential to plan for additional avenues to ensure end users accept, adopt, and understand change. We share a few of the best practices we are deploying with our customers in small and large engagements:

• Leveraging collaboration platforms for virtual learning
• Preparing just-in-time course content for team enablement
• Building quick-reference guides that are shared physically and electronically
• Using augmented reality (virtual reality glasses) to visualize processes and collaborate on issues
• Communicating with numerous quick touchpoints on virtual platforms daily and augmenting that with various collaboration tools, like SharePoint, Google Docs, Slack, and Microsoft Teams
• Prescriptively ramping up in-person opportunities for knowledge sharing and other forms of support

What differentiates you in the chemical industry?

At NTT DATA Business Solutions, we focus solely on implementing 51风流software products 鈥� 51风流is in our DNA. Over the years, we have spent a great amount of time working with our customers to understand their business challenges and problems, so we can help them realize solutions, obtain benefits, and meet corporate objectives.

Having these experiences and focusing only on 51风流products has allowed us to create global practices, or competency centers, which share in the development of business content (pre-configured best practices) and our own (software extension solutions to solve common chemical gaps).

Finally, we have scaled our ability to cover nearly all 51风流solutions with strategic acquisitions in supply chain, such as , and have long-standing partnerships with niche competencies to fulfill all of your 51风流needs through one service integrator.

How can people connect with NTT DATA Business Solutions?

We have a variety of assets available on our Website for chemical companies that are evaluating 51风流solutions or current customers planning their business transformations. Please follow us on and visit our channels for more background on how we help businesses thrive and transform in the chemical industry.

Looking to stay connected with the chemical Industry? Please join the , follow us on Twitter , and check out our .

51风流is a leader in the chemical industry and is committed to continuous innovation. We encourage you to collaborate with us and discuss how the 51风流solution portfolio can enable the Intelligent Enterprise in the chemical industry.

David Dunn is director of Global Industries Marketing at SAP.

Linx-AS helps businesses be more of what they aspire to be with SAP鈥攕trategic, innovative, sustainable, productive, and profitable. In doing so, it brings the highest level of expertise to its customers, delivering thoughtfully designed and meticulously implemented solutions.

Here, we talk with Jeff Frye, president and CEO of Linx-AS.

Q: When you talk to chemical customers, what excites you about the chemical industry?

A: First off, the chemical industry is where Linx-AS got its start in 2000 with our environment, health, and safety consulting practice, so our chemical roots run deep. Since that time, the many changes and challenges chemical companies have faced鈥攚hether internal or external鈥攈ave been met with innovation. It鈥檚 truly a dynamic industry, and that鈥檚 what makes working in chemicals exciting for us. We have earned insight on how chemical manufacturers operate and the business processes that drive success. It鈥檚 a natural fit for us to innovate with 51风流technologies to deliver inspired customer solutions.

2020 was quite the year. What do you see as the top priorities for chemical customers in 2021?

Everyone was blindsided by the pandemic and the disruptions to life and business as we knew it. If there was a bright spot to 2020, it鈥檚 that the market and operational stresses were a catalyst for transformation trends that will continue as priorities through 2021.

Across industries, a predictable focus on worker health and safety emerged. I believe companies will continue to shore up foundational data and processes while exploring innovative ways, like mobile, the Internet of Things (IoT), and sensors, to extend the enterprise into the workplace.

Another priority will be research and development (R&D). Confronted with disrupted supply chains, the need for R&D agility became painfully apparent. Whether it鈥檚 reformulating products with substitute raw materials or developing for alternative markets, streamlining upstream definitely makes the list.

And then for chemicals especially, sustainability is key moving forward鈥攏ot only taking care of what you produce now but driving sustainable product development for the future, which ties into R&D agility.

How has digital enabled these priorities from your perspective?

Digital is critical. I think there are a lot of definitions and expectations鈥攐r maybe aspirations鈥攐f digital floating around. For our customers, foundational work often needs to be done before realizing or even recognizing transformational opportunities. Reflecting on the priorities, simply centralizing data and digitalizing current processes in these areas is step one.

For instance, I mentioned health and safety initiatives. We鈥檝e engaged in pilots and proofs of concept for mobile and IoT in this space to increase data collection and accuracy to ultimately drive decision-making and safety performance. The key takeaway is that you can collect all the data you want with sensors and apps. However, if your foundation isn鈥檛 solid, you can鈥檛 process the data in a meaningful way. To make digital effective, you must put data to work to deliver insights and drive workflow across the enterprise. My advice to customers is to definitely explore innovative solutions, but make sure you鈥檙e innovating on solid ground. That approach will lead to true transformation.

You just mentioned mobile. How do you see the mobile landscape in SAP, and do you have any advice for chemical customers embarking on mobile initiatives?

That鈥檚 a rich topic. There are so many factors to consider when looking at mobile, ranging from the technical to corporate policy to user personas to security. Are you running 51风流S/4HANA or still on 51风流ERP? Do you have a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policy? Do your users require offline capabilities? It goes on and on. It鈥檚 an exercise we help clients with all the time. To sum up, the landscape is difficult. But the mobile landscape, particularly with cloud solutions from SAP, has a lot of potential for customers.

What I will say is that mobile is beyond exploratory; it鈥檚 expected now. It鈥檚 part of everyday life outside of work, so users demand it on the job with the same user experience (UX) performance. For some areas of SAP, you鈥檒l require custom development to extend core capabilities. For instance, we鈥檝e built a suite of risk management apps to augment 51风流Environment, Health, and Safety Management by supporting additional use cases. For a customer in a development situation, I鈥檇 say pay attention to your users, use standard technologies, and choose an easily deployable architecture.

When we talk to chemical industry customers, big or small, change management is a key pillar of digital transformation.聽 How do you see this topic in the industry?

It all comes down to communication. If you assess and understand the risks going into a transformation project, you鈥檒l be prepared to navigate the challenges鈥攁nd there are always challenges. If everyone impacted, from the top to shop, is engaged early, you鈥檙e on solid footing when you encounter bumps. It sounds simple, but it鈥檚 often difficult because of things that you can鈥檛 necessarily control. You need champions for your solution in impacted areas. Sometimes they鈥檙e not there or as vocal as needed. You need executive buy-in. Again, it鈥檚 another variable.

One thing we do at Linx-AS, a thing we can control, is constantly thinking of the end user in the solution鈥攆rom design through implementation and support. Most failures can be attributed to breakdowns in user adoption. It鈥檚 critical to get user feedback and involve users in prototyping, so there are no surprises, or at least fewer, when you roll out and train your teams.

Why partner with Linx-AS?

What we hear most from our customers is usually one or all of three things: you understand our business, you really know SAP, and you give it to us straight. Because our focus in PLM and EHS is so specialized, we鈥檝e invested heavily in our people, drawing from talent who have worked in industry and keeping them up to speed on the latest technology. It鈥檚 not commodity consulting that you can contract out. You need people who know the complexities of the chemical industry and have the business acumen to apply technology smartly. And, to the last of the three, that鈥檚 just how we do business. When you partner with Linx-AS, you get honest assessments of what will bring the most value to your business.

What makes Linx-AS different from other implementation partners in the chemical industry?

Echoing my last comments, our expertise in PLM and EHS, coupled with our understanding of the chemical industry, is unmatched. But, to expand on this, I鈥檇 say that our Innovations Division is truly a differentiator. We have a dedicated team that is churning out solutions that extend SAP. Whether it鈥檚 workflow solutions in recipe development or our offering for 51风流Environment, Health, and Safety Management, we continually have an eye toward bringing added value to customers and designing solutions that engage end users.

How does Linx-AS create value for the chemical industry and how can people connect with you?聽

I鈥檇 go back to part of the Linx-AS vision statement that says, 鈥淲e help businesses be more of what they aspire to be with SAP.鈥� We understand chemical manufacturers have significant investment in 51风流technology to realize benefits across the enterprise, but sometimes the path to value, particularly in the specialized areas of PLM and EHS, isn鈥檛 always clear cut. We simplify that path, provide focus for customers, and bring additional innovation to the platform that engages users and improves business performance.

As far as getting in touch, you can reach me at jfrye@linxas.com. For the latest on Linx-AS, you can go to our or follow us at @LinxASLLC.

Looking to stay connected with the chemical Industry?聽 Join the , follow us on Twitter , and check out our .

51风流is a leader in the chemical industry, and we are committed to continuous innovation. We encourage you to collaborate with us and discuss how the 51风流solution portfolio can enable the intelligent enterprise in the chemical industry.

Mark Carlson is an chemicals solution expert at SAP.

Enowa is active in the chemical industry, leading multiple business and 51风流S/4HANA transformations as well as sponsoring the recent ASUG Best Practices for Chemicals event. During this event, Enowa鈥檚 client, Jayhawk Chemical, spoke about its five-month 51风流S/4HANA business transformation, and Lubrizol shared how Celonis was leveraged to support its 51风流S/4HANA journey.

Here, we talk with Rick Place, partner and vice president of Marketing and Client Development at Enowa Consulting.

Q: When you talk to chemical customers, what excites you about the industry?

A: The chemical industry is SAP鈥檚 foundation; it is the base of why 51风流ERP came to life. Similarly, Enowa started with most of its clients in the chemical industry, and now its client base spans across all sectors of manufacturing (mill to food, repetitive to discrete) and other industry sectors.

Our excitement of and alignment with the 51风流community in the chemical industry is firmly rooted in our start. I think, like everyone, we get excited when we talk about our roots. The roots establish the tenure of our experts. We have 51风流configurations that are more than 20 years old deployed at various divisions of companies that have been bought and sold for decades 鈥� and Enowa鈥檚 configuration footprint is still running at those clients!

What excites me is the drive for efficiency and change. In 2021, we expect to see many mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, and spin-offs. These transactions are always prevalent in the chemical space, but the frequency is increasing and the speed requirements to complete these projects increases for shorter timelines. This results in a landscape complexity reduction in the divesting company and a lower cost of TSA for the acquiring entity. We are excited because our competence in both scenarios is our core.

In addition, over the more than 20 years I鈥檝e been leading Enowa鈥檚 alignment for new projects, I鈥檝e been able to lean heavily on our successful delivery team. I cannot think of a better compliment than trust and partnership between Enowa and our clients. In sum, trust is what excites me to make a difference every day with clients.

Looking forward into 2021, what do you see as the top priorities for chemical customers?

Speed. We see two needs for speed. The first is with clients who need real data in real time, or close to it. They are calling on Enowa experts to drive transformation projects both in 51风流ERP and 51风流S/4HANA landscapes. Most commonly, we are driving results on these topics:

• Financial optimization projects leveraging group reporting and 51风流Analytics Cloud for planning
• Analytics based on having data governance and data accessibility to visualize and analyze data
• Reviewing process execution with Celonis
• 51风流S/4HANA transformations through a mutually agreed upon approach:
  • Selective data transition to limit business disruption and leverage existing parts while leaving behind undesired areas
  • Greenfield to move away from years of unnecessary customization
  • Brownfield to leverage previous releases in good condition

The second need for speed is around mergers, acquisitions, and divestitures, largely driven by private equity. For these clients, our consultants run these complex projects. They will expect a fully functioning system in short order.

Overall, the chemical industry is continuing to leverage advancing technologies. We see more activity around these topics:

• Process excellence such as rapid financial closing; refined and optimized planning and scenario-based planning; shop floor integration with 51风流Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence; and customer experience focused on enabling sales teams with 51风流Sales Cloud and backend customer satisfaction with 51风流Commerce Cloud
• Digitalization such as supply chain integration of data from shop floor, lab, and sales with actionable insights; and robotic process analysis (RPA) analysis, assessment, and results projection, leveraging available RPA technology

How has digital enabled these priorities from your perspective?

We no longer only talk to IT about business system transformation. We talk to the business in their terms so they can understand how 51风流products improve productivity for their department. In the chemical industry, we do not see wide corporate adoption of digital transformation, but adoption in pointed areas. For instance, our Connect Lab combines real-time data with actionable insights to keep products moving, with temperature range and with notification of any supply chain disruptions.

We had a chance to hear about Enowa鈥檚 51风流S/4HANA implementation at Jayhawk Fine Chemical Corporation during various ASUG events. At Jayhawk, 51风流S/4HANA was deployed in five months.聽 What made this project successful?

The foundation is always the excitement for change. Enowa鈥檚 business process experts were able to demonstrate foundational changes that would help every department drive efficiency, and now fast forward to the past year where every person is essential and process efficiency is key. Once we established the C-suite鈥檚 commitment to change, we kept them visible while navigating around the other departments, from finance, to production, to warehouse, and to customer service.

The ability for our experts to create excitement about change is key. Jayhawk鈥檚 team was as equally committed and motivated as we were, which is the key for accomplishing a project together. We always explain this to clients: The software works, but we cannot just do this project to you, we need to do it with you.

When we talk to customers, big or small, change management is a key pillar of digital transformation. How are companies embracing these changes and equipping their teams for success?

I see two things here. Readiness and change management.

Our clients understand that 51风流S/4HANA works; the end-to-end technology supports the majority of business processes, especially in the chemical industry. What is often confused is the business changes necessary in a readiness phase. These include the story build, the vision, and many benefit statements needed to bring the business into a lead or co-lead position for foundational change. Given Enowa鈥檚 business consulting experts, we build the storyboard to ensure the business drives projects and participates in key decisions. Simultaneously, Enowa is working with IT to build the platform, including systems, applications, and technology components as preparation for a successful adoption of 51风流S/4HANA.

Recently, organizational change management is a regular topic. In the past, Enowa had always executed a 鈥渢rain the trainer鈥� approach via our consultants who performed the project and were most intimate with configuration and supporting documentation. As change is now occurring with remote work and more disparate operations, we approach each client with a rich program to understand what it means to do their job after go-live. These programs contain knowledge portals for managing and tracking training, documentation, help guides, and other key elements. We also promote a non-live system that is close to what a productive solution would look like for larger programs, so users can touch and feel a system in a day-in-the-life scenario.

Enowa is a close partner to 51风流and continues to execute successful projects. What advice can you offer to our chemical clients to enable success?

We have a few pillars of success, which have been recent changes to the current delivery capacity. These foundational delivery components, in a remote setting, can be leveraged by 51风流clients as well.

• Execute in small teams. Only engage meeting or project participation with those that are critical. Wide project teams take longer to move and communication is more challenging.
• Look at the pieces of a process that are most complex and tackle them succinctly in small groups and consumable portions. Engage an internal or external expert to validate the overall process before digging in deeper.
• Encourage and equip every participant with good audio, visual, and remote working means.
• Spend the time and effort to build a robust training plan and execute it thoroughly.

How does Enowa create value for the chemical Industry and how can people connect with you?

Recognizing the Enowa logo is getting easier given the depth of our projects in the chemical industry. We are growing our activity in many areas of SAP, like chemical and other manufacturing industries such as food, consumer packaged goods, and pharmaceuticals.

While our logo appears up with the large system integrators, we are still intimate in what we do 鈥� our clients appreciate and realize having the right dedicated expert, not necessarily a whole swath of resources in a different country, is needed. When we deliver our projects with a smaller team of experts, communication is streamlined, clutter is lost, and the overall number of delivery hours is a fraction of when trying to execute with too many consultants.

As many of our clients will tell you, I am available when you need me, and this is true of our team. I鈥檓 routinely getting text messages from the executives at our clients and responding to calls and e-mails at all times of the day. We can be followed on social media, contacted through an expert on our website chat, called at 610-296-3640, or e-mailed at info@enowa.com.

Looking to stay connected with the chemical industry? Join the , follow us on Twitter , and check out our .

51风流is a leader in the chemical industry and is committed to continuous innovation. We encourage you to collaborate with us and discuss how the 51风流solution portfolio can enable the intelligent enterprise in the chemical industry.

Matthew Reymann is a chemicals solution specialist at SAP.

To bring this perspective to the 51风流community in the chemical industry, we are kicking off 2021 with our Chemical Industry Partner Stage Series.

, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., announced it has come together with Hitachi Consulting as one company to create a new digital infrastructure and solutions powerhouse. The new Hitachi Vantara combines consulting-led digital solutions and vertical industry expertise of Hitachi Consulting with Hitachi Vantara’s IT and Internet of Things (IoT) domain expertise. Going forward, the integrated company will help customers develop practical, scalable digital strategies and solutions that transform operational processes, improve customer experiences, and create new business models to drive innovation and growth.

Hitachi Vantara has evolved since its founding in 1989 from a manufacturer of mainframes, to enterprise storage systems, to complete cloud computing solutions, to complete digital transformation services. Today, Hitachi Vantara provides hardware, software, content platforms, storage arrays, and professional services globally.

Hitachi was founded over 100 years ago and is one of the largest manufacturing conglomerates in the world with over 200 manufacturing facilities that produce automotive parts and systems, robotics, military vehicles, construction machinery, locomotives, consumer products, steel, wire and cable, telecommunications equipment, IT infrastructure, wind generation systems, nuclear power plants, hydroelectric power plants, elevators and escalators, aerospace components, power grid equipment, chemicals, and infrastructure components.

Here, we talk with Jack Roman, vice president of Americas, and Kimberly Reid, vice president of U.S., 51风流Solutions, from Hitachi Vantara.

Q: When you talk to chemical customers, what excites you about the chemical industry?

A: Our company was founded as a manufacturing company and both of us have backgrounds in manufacturing. Kimberley came out of the chemical industry, Jack came out of the glass manufacturing industry, and both of us have spent over 25 years consulting for primarily manufacturing firms. Close to 20 years ago we decided to focus on the chemical industry and have worked with many chemical companies over the years.

We both have a passion for manufacturing, helping process manufacturing companies improve and compete, and, for a lack of a better term, working with old school heavy industrial manufacturing firms. We both still get excited to walk into a chemical plant and learn about its business, challenges, history, and evolution as a firm. Some people get excited about Silicon Valley or fancy consumer products; we get excited about chemicals!

2020 was a crazy year. Looking forward, what do you see as the top priorities for chemical customers in 2021?

Yes, 2020 was a crazy year. We saw chemical companies having economic challenges for probably 12 months or more before the coronavirus hit. COVID-19 obviously added greatly to these challenges. We saw a lot of companies in crisis management throughout 2020, but now we are starting to see management refocusing on longer term priorities.

I think the top themes we hear from chemical company executives are the reevaluation of supply chains caused by both COVID-19 and trade disputes, new technologies and consumer demands impacting the bottom line and the ability to forecast the future, sustainability and risk management, and the volatility of commodity prices. Besides managing the impact of COVID-19 and trying to determine how work life will change in the future, if we had to prioritize what challenges we hear chemical companies addressing and investing in to address in 2021, number one would be sustainability and the circular economy, then alternative material sources (renewable, bio-based), and finally digitization (IoT, sensors, automation).

How has digital enabled these priorities from your perspective?

Digital is all about capturing data, storing data, and analyzing data. Digital has enabled the ability to capture huge amounts of data that weren鈥檛 available in the past. Capturing it is one thing, but the value comes from having the tools and ability to analyze the data and use it to make decisions, change, and react. Whether its customer preferences, supply chain track and trace, manufacturing efficiencies, product quality, or employee and environmental safety 鈥� whatever the priority 鈥� we see companies investing to build the capability to capture data and use the results of analysis to improve their business.

When we talk to chemical industry customers, big or small, change management is a key pillar of digital transformation. How are companies embracing these changes and equipping their teams for success?

From our perspective as a professional services firm focused on process manufacturing for the past 25 years, we have seen a significant shift in our projects. At one time it was very technical, a very technology-centric approach to implementing solutions. Then it became all about speed: how can customers reduce three- to five-year implementations to a year or under a year鈥攑re-configured industry solutions, methodologies, code libraries, and templates.

But, even the most efficient implementations were not always totally successful because one piece was missing: change management. About 10 years ago we realized that change management was as important or perhaps more important than any other component of a transformation. We started placing much more emphasis on it in our projects, training our consultants, and eventually incorporating it as a key part of our methodology. Our chemical customers today are much more aware of the importance of change management, and they don鈥檛 need to be convinced to invest the money and resources in this part of a project.

Companies recognize that there is a lot of change involved and recognize the importance of planning for this and addressing it. It鈥檚 one of our primary conversation topics with customers when we are planning digital transformations. When it comes to equipping their teams, it鈥檚 recognized that key customer resources that hold credibility in the organization should be tasked with change management. It is recognized that consulting resources, in some cases a significant amount, should be retained as part of the project. Whether our project manager pushes it or the customer realizes it and wants it, there is an emphasis on change management tasks and deliverables. These include training, communication, executive sponsorship and involvement, job function change evaluation, and all of the tools that help with these.

We had a chance to hear about Hitachi Vantara鈥檚 51风流S/4HANA implementation at Tokyo Chemicals during the 2019 Best Practices for Chemicals event. What made this project successful?

This project was successful because of our desire to be fully aligned with their strategic goals and business vision. We understood the need to partner, collaborate, and think creatively in the midst of a global pandemic where our entire global team worked virtually. Our 51风流S/4HANA go-live occurred in May 2020 and the global big bang deployment to transform operations was quite remarkable.

What does Hitachi Vantara deliver in your Chemical Industry Best Practices business scenarios template?

We leverage the pre-configured content at the core of 51风流S/4HANA and focus on bringing to light the value of specific 51风流Fiori apps, embedded analytics, and embedded capabilities in transportation management and warehouse management to provide an end-to-end solution capability. In addition, we deliver simplified integrated business planning scenarios to enable consensus-based planning processes, inventory optimization, and the development of constrained supply plans. Our focus is on delivering value in a meaningful way that will drive higher user adoption rates and sustainable business value.

What makes Hitachi Vantara different from other implementation partners in the chemical industry?

We believe that our understanding of the pain points, challenges, and trends facing our customers is one of our greatest strengths. We recognize that when we help our clients learn their new business processes in conjunction with 51风流products, end users will adhere to the new ways of executing tasks. This supports maximizing business value attainment and helps our customers see value in the 51风流investment.

We stay connected to the latest innovations that are planned in our areas of focus and we assist in determining the relevancy of these capabilities for the clients we serve. We define implementation strategies and approaches that support the customer throughout their entire journey. We enjoy sharing our lessons learned and helping our clients to grow and develop a passion for 51风流solution capabilities.

Why partner with Hitachi Vantara?

Hitachi isn鈥檛 just a top 51风流partner and a leader in the chemical industry; we are also a large, global manufacturing organization that happens to be one of the largest users of 51风流in the world. We focus on manufacturing companies with a heavy emphasis on process manufacturing. We have been delivering 51风流solutions utilizing the Chemical Industry Best Practices template for over 15 years. Change management is a key component of our methodology and all our projects. Our teams consist of experienced consultants, many of whom have worked in the chemical industry and understand manufacturing.

How does Hitachi Vantara create value for the chemical industry and how can people connect with you?

We create value by helping to demystify the 51风流value proposition for mid-size chemical manufacturing companies and allow them to streamline their software portfolio while lowering operational costs associated with using SAP. We help to provide the foundation for growth and further innovation through the 51风流platform. We help our clients adopt new business models by leveraging the tools and accelerators available through our Hitachi manufacturing heritage. You can reach us at Jack.Roman@hitachivantara.com and Kimberley.Reid@hitachivantara.com.

Looking to stay connected with the chemical industry? Join the 51风流Chemical Industry Community on LinkedIn, follow us on Twitter @SAPChemicals, and check out our .

51风流is a leader in the chemical industry, and we are committed to continuous innovation. We encourage you to collaborate with us and discuss how the 51风流solution portfolio can enable the intelligent chemical enterprise.

Mark Carlson is a chemicals solution expert at SAP.

Industry 4.Now focuses on using digital technology to gather and analyze data across machines and business systems by enabling faster, more efficient processes. This brings together manufacturing, logistics, sales, and services to achieve value in a short period of time. Now is the time for chemical companies to start refining their Industry 4.0 strategies. A study by the World Economic Forum found that 87% percent of chemical executives say companies that do not embrace digital will lose their competitive edge and may face extinction.

51风流has been engaged in the Industry 4.0 discussion and its strategy since 2011, when it first became an academic discussion. During this time, 51风流was an integral part of the definition of Industry 4.0 as the future high-tech strategy for 2020.

Earlier this year, 51风流announced the company initiative Industry 4.Now to provide applications and advanced technologies that bring to life Industry 4.0 and the Intelligent Enterprise.

Two industry trends show how Industry 4.0 will play a part in the future of chemicals:

• Improving sustainability: Resource scarcity, government regulations, and changing consumer expectations call for innovative business models 鈥媋nd platforms in support of more sustainable practices. With governments and other organizations starting to enforce sustainability measures, such as bans on single-use plastics, as well as emissions regulations, chemical companies will need to adapt to these new regulations and lead the way to a sustainable future.
• Delivering new customer experiences: With ongoing commoditization and margin erosion, chemical companies are required to focus on co-innovation and the selling of business value and outcomes instead of just products. The ultimate goal is to deliver entirely new customer and consumer experiences by putting data at the core of everything companies do.

ALBIS聽Plastic GmbH, for example, is a leading聽global聽operating聽companies of聽thermoplastics. The company wanted to introduce predictive quality analytics across its compounding operations. However, silos of locally stored information meant that conducting predictive quality analysis across all manufacturing locations would be a challenge.

By using 51风流Cloud Platform and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, ALBIS now uses advanced analytics to review historical production and process data. Based on this, the solution analyzes patterns associated with previous quality issues and uses these to identify key quality risk areas within the processes. These results are then communicated to quality management teams using reports and dashboards.

Since implementing this solution, ALBIS has seen improved visibility and analysis of production line performance. The company now had an architecture blueprint that can be used for Big Data analytics use cases and has minimal system maintenance required thanks to the cloud-based software as a service.

For chemical companies, the 51风流strategy around Industry 4.Now can be broken into four different areas.

Intelligent Products

Intelligent products for the chemical industry are not necessarily focused on making the existing products more intelligent, but instead on offering new products or offering new value adding services business models. This is done by leveraging data and new intelligent technologies from across the entire product life cycle. Companies can then streamline the research and development process or rely on digital services to deliver outcome-based business models颅颅颅 to their customers. This requires an environment that welcomes collaboration and open co-innovation.

Intelligent Factories

Intelligent factories 鈥� or, from a chemical perspective, intelligent plants 鈥� focus on a company鈥檚 need to make efficient use of materials and energy while still producing at a high quality. They are also forced to react quickly to changing demands and unforeseen events. COVID-19 is an example of this; many chemical companies quickly adapted their factories to produce more products such as hand sanitizers or PPE gear.

Chemical companies are doing this by using intelligent data analytics for optimizing their production and horizontally integrating production with supply and demand chains.

Intelligent Assets

Companies are looking for ways to avoid downtime of equipment and increase their asset performance. They are doing this by shifting from a reactive asset management plan to predictive and proactive data-driven plans.

Empowered People

The Industry 4.0 strategy takes the people component a step further by not just making the people working in plants more intelligent, but offering resources and training to empower employees to do their job more efficiently and safely. Companies are always looking for ways to reduce risk of manual errors while increasing people performance. Providing real-time data-driven decision support helps to ensure safety, increase performance, and further drive innovation.

Now more than ever, chemical companies need to be able to rely on their digital strategies to help companies evolve and adapt to changing customer expectations. For more information, .

Jenna O鈥橳oole is a solution specialist at SAP.

It is not a slogan, not a message board, not just policy. For the most successful chemical companies around the world, safety is their core value, and safety is their mission to make the world a better place, which starts with ensuring employees leave the facility the same way they came in. While there are industry averages to compare against, there are not acceptable limits. The goal is zero, and the expectation is perfection.

A safety culture is not built overnight, and an important component of this culture is creating an environment where employees connect to the mission of their company, which for the chemical industry is often to make the world a safer, healthier, and better place to live.

A company with direction can encourage focus and create ownership to operate with a higher responsibility to society. This is not just what products or services are being delivered, but they are important. The how this is accomplished is built on safety at the core of the business. When coexisting, understanding the why and the how encourages employees to champion the company culture. There is understanding and ownership that operating safely inherently creates value for the company and for society.

This must be in parallel with rigorous safety protocols that ensure processes, hazards, and risks are understood and addressed. This extends well beyond procedures as the success of safety culture resides in a company鈥檚 ability to empower its employees to do the right thing every time, no questions asked. It is not just the result of talking about safety, rather it is a mindset of actively applying safety principles to everything that happens across the business and even bringing this mindset home. Sometimes putting safety as a No. 1 priority impacts operating margins or capacity. But with a strong safety culture, there is no tradeoff, simply an unwavering commitment to employee health. For chemical companies, this is the prerequisite for sustainable operations and success in the market.

A strong safety culture extends to every facet of an organization. Safety must be at the core and is fundamental to every decision that is made. A safety culture must be constantly nourished, requiring processes to be evaluated, dialogue to be open, people to be collaborative, and sentiments understood. This is complex and no single component turns the needle. It is a collective effort to build this culture top down and bottom up.

For SAP, the importance of environmental, health, and safety (EHS) is evident in the 20-plus year record of investment, innovation, and market leadership in delivering solutions. By leveraging data to drive analysis and actionable insight, the collaboration among EHS practitioners, corporate leaders, and field operations drives world-class safety processes.

Michael Censurato, EHS solution manager at SAP, helps bring this solution to the market and the value proposition is clear: 鈥淭he modular but unified platform provided by 51风流enables the EHS function within an enterprise to be more aware, reduce risk, drive intelligent processes, and be at the forefront of digital transformation instead of being left behind on a non-integrated island.鈥�

Solutions include incident management, health and safety management, environmental management, management of change, and maintenance safety embedded in 51风流S/4HANA, delivering a harmonized platform and a single source of truth. This is about enabling a holistic approach to embed safety and operational risk management into all operations, making critical safety information available to all 鈥� top floor to shop floor, and enabling EHS practitioners to lead within their organizations.

Putting in perspective how companies continue to transform, Censurato says, 鈥淐ompanies have begun to see the value of an integrated platform approach to solving EHS issues. The current situation regarding the coronavirus puts this in sharp focus and is forcing companies to rethink how they will operate going forward. 51风流is uniquely capable of driving the process and data integration required for businesses to thrive in the years to come, while adding a layer of intelligence along the way.鈥�

For chemical companies, one thing will not change: their commitment to safety. Safety will be at the core and 51风流is excited to be a part of this journey leveraging digital transformation in the drive to zero.

Matthew Reymann is a chemicals solution specialist at SAP.

Some of these opportunities and risks include:

• New business models and optimized operations through predictive models and machine learning
• Widespread adoption of business platform technologies that are expanding industry boundaries to create collaborative, integrated, and innovation-driven ecosystems
• Continuous threats from high capital costs, fluctuating raw material prices, volatile geopolitical climates, mass commoditization, and an overwhelming amount of regulations

In a perfect world, confronting these challenges would be as simple as embedding intelligence, such as machine learning, into business systems and processes. Unfortunately, today鈥檚 industry realities require so much more 鈥� namely, new sources of value and unique skills that can transform the value chain and business models.

There is so much at stake throughout the industry. But for many 51风流customers, the 51风流Model Company service for Chemicals is accelerating and simplifying the path to competitive business transformation.

What Is 51风流Model Company for Chemicals?

51风流Model Company for Chemicals is a collection of insights, knowledge, and lessons learned, acquired through decades of experience in working with companies from the chemicals industry. The service is an evolving portfolio of the latest reference solutions, industry best practices, and master data 鈥� all designed to provide the knowledge and skills that chemicals businesses need to optimize end-to-end processes and sharpen decision-making.

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For many customers, 51风流Model Company for Chemicals is a critical component in their accelerated conversion to 51风流S/4HANA. The service boasts a library of model company offerings that covers a large variety of core processes. It also allows customers to experiment and test new use cases in order to inspire innovative change in areas such as product development, safety, and stewardship; manufacturing and procurement; sales, logistics, and asset management; and IT monitoring. Industry-specific topics are also supported, especially batch traceability, active ingredients subcontracting, quality control, and regulatory compliance.

51风流Model Company for Chemicals is also helping 聽customers reimagine their operational processes. By providing a blueprint for choosing and implementing the right intelligent technologies and analytics capabilities for their businesses, customers are experiencing considerable changes in product safety and stewardship as well as tank-level monitoring.

As new innovations continue to be added to the model company portfolio, more efficient practices are introduced into functions such as compliance, sales, management of safety data sheets, and dangerous goods management.

Rediscover Your Edge with Unprecedented Business Value and Intelligence

The beauty of 51风流Model Company for Chemicals is the potential to turn every business improvement into an opportunity that will shape success for years to come. Whether streamlining existing processes, optimizing decision-making, boosting revenue and profits, improving customer satisfaction, or capitalizing on emerging opportunities, chemical companies can set the priorities that drive the right changes with the right digital tools.

Stay in the conversation by following the 51风流Services and Support offerings on ,听, , and聽.

Maurice Carl Zettel is a business process consultant for 51风流Digital Business Services.