Our series, Strategic Imperatives for the Chemical Industry discusses the issues that industry organizations are most concerned about going forward in 2015. Based on extensive research performed by the Eventful Group, these key issues come directly from players in the industry ranging from small blossoming organizations to the household name manufacturing giants.
Part three of our series discusses the points of interest in optimizing and streamlining business processes. If you missed our previous installments, follow the links below to get back up to speed.
Strategic Imperatives for the Chemical Industry – Part 1: Evolution through Digital Transformation
Strategic Imperatives for the Chemical Industry – Part 2: Mergers, Acquisitions, and Divestitures
The chemical community is seeking to better understand best practices for applying, standardizing and automating processes. It views processes from three distinct perspectives―technology processes, internal business processes and client facing processes (sales/marketing and e-commerce). Organizations are finding successes in leveraging outsourcing as a mechanism to necessitate the development of concrete business and technology processes.
The following are the essential questions posed by the chemicals industry players during the Eventful Group’s research sessions.
- How do organizations build and implement a simple global standard?
- What are the best practices in defining and mapping processes?
- Communication of processes and process changes is critical―what are the best practices and mechanisms to communicate?
- How can organizations leverage the roles of Centers of Excellence (COE), Business Relationship Managers (BRMs) and internal intranets to align the IT organization with the business and with the greater strategic business processes and objectives?
- How do organizations track and document the ROI from process change and enhancement to fuel greater adoption and appetite for future process refinement?
- What are the best practices to mitigate the negative implications of running multiple instances?
- Organizations are seeking best practices to reduce the number of sources where data is inputted as a way to simplify processes.
- Standardization vs. differentiation―when does it make sense for a division or function to differentiate as opposed to standardizing?
- What are the best practices in business process automation? How do best practices differ in this space with respect to industry segment, environment/market factors and functional requirements?
Do these conversation points resonate within your organization? Do you have experience or knowledge to share? Please feel free to reach out or leave a comment below.
To get answers to these, and other top industry questions, be sure to participate in our SAP Best Practices for Chemicals Conference on March 14-16, 2016 at the Woodlands Waterway, Texas.
We look forward to seeing you there!
