Telltale Signs Your Chemical Enterprise Needs a Modern Business Management System

We understand that businesses in the chemical industry are under great pressure to stay competitive while complying with a wide range of challenges, from government regulations, global competition to pricing. Particularly, access to the information required for government compliance (including SARA Title III, OSHA Hazard Communication Standard, ANSI, and more) is demanding increasing labor and money.

Plus, in today’s marketplace, the chemical industry, like many others, is under continuous pressure to efficiently manage the day-to-day business while simultaneously working through strategic issues, competition, and the globalization of the industry. It is no stretch of the imagination to see that modern, well-integrated solutions that deliver regulatory compliance, quality management, financial management, customer service, business intelligence and reporting, purchasing, pricing and process automation, will increase a business’s efficiency and assuage the business leader’s pressure and fears.

Do You Feel The Pressure?

These pressures are compounded by yet another key issue – the short supply of IT experts at the ready to jump in and help. So are home-grown or disparate solutions going to work anymore? Not for companies who want to stay ahead! Let’s look at some telltale signs to see if NOW is the right time to make the transition to digital transformation for your Chemical business.

Here are several tell-tale signs that it’s time to make a change:

• A vendor is ending support for one or more components of the IT infrastructure, whether that is the business application or underlying technology.
• An upgrade to your current system approaches the cost and level of effort of your new system implementation.
• You need to purchase another software package for a specific purpose adding to your already siloed infrastructure.
• You are dissatisfied with your current vendor product, support levels, or service quality.
• It’s becoming increasingly difficult to find talent to operate and support your current system.
• Your team spends significant time with manual workarounds, particularly uploading and downloading data into different systems.
• Your data “source of truth” is a spreadsheet rather than an operational system.
• You have new functionality requirements (compliance or other) that are not supported by your current system.
• The company is positioning itself to be acquired.
• The user interface no longer meets customer needs and isn’t extensible to new mobility, security or self-service requirements.
• The company has experienced a painful recall and was unable to execute all required processes as efficiently as could be.

In Conclusion

Okay, are any of these issues creating a flashing red light on your office computer? Not to worry, you are not alone…

“Every executive knows the problem. Established companies try to get as much as they can from their investments in legacy systems. When they come up against the systems’ limitations, they devise patches or workarounds. While useful in the short term, over time these remedies can create incompatibilities among discrete layers of the technology stack and among applications within a layer. Companies may find that they are actually increasing their operating costs in the long run and missing opportunities to embrace more efficient and more innovative ways of working through digitization.” -McKinsey

Chemical manufacturing and distribution businesses deserve a complete business management strategy which provides a fully integrated, purpose-built solution – so there is a clear intersection of people, processes, and technology to help clients with their digital transformation, improve business efficiencies and deliver a customer-centric experience. So take long hard look at your business infrastructure – are you trading short term cost savings for long term inefficiencies and higher operating cost? Now may be the time to make a change!