Through a research period of four months, Eventful Conferences has conducted extensive interviews with 50+ chemical industry companies, and held two roundtable events in key chemical industry locations – Philadelphia, PA and Houston, TX. The intention of the research is to summarize the most common and critical challenges that the industry must address – crucial to their success. These pain points have been identified by the industry during the roundtables and throughout the interviews.
The Best Practices for Chemicals Conference will strive to address each challenge, pain point and trend by providing solution-oriented presentations, backed by specific evidence and packaged to provide the audience with clear takeaways on how to achieve similar results.
In this issue we will discuss key questions around simplification and consolidation of complex IT landscapes. If you missed or would like to revisit the previous entries in our series, please follow the links below.
Strategic Imperatives for the Chemical Industry - Part 1: Mergers, Acquisitions & Divestitures
Strategic Imperatives for the Chemical Industry - Part 2: Digitizing the Chemical Enterprise
Strategic Imperatives for the Chemical Industry – Part 3: Analytics & Reporting
Strategic Imperatives for the Chemical Industry – Part 4: Business Process Optimization
Strategic Imperatives for the Chemical Industry – Part 5: Keeping up with a changing World
Strategic Imperatives for the Chemical Industry – Part 6: Supply Chain and Logistics
Strategic Imperatives for the Chemical Industry – Part 7: Migration to S/4HANA
Strategic Imperatives for the Chemical Industry - Part 8: Regulatory Issues
Strategic Imperatives for the Chemical Industry - Part 9: Manufacturing
Strategic Imperatives for the Chemical Industry - Part 10: Procurement
Strategic Imperatives for the Chemical Industry – Part 11: Cloud Strategy
Strategic Imperatives for the Chemical Industry – Part 12: Becoming Mobile
Strategic Imperatives for the Chemical Industry – Part 13: Master Data Governance
- Managing Multiple Interfaces and Integrating Disparate Systems
Many companies have purchased a variety of products to address different business needs, or have otherwise inherited a scenario where aspects of the business run on different instances of SAP and non-SAP programs. Further, many have different interfaces, some of which may be localized to meet regulatory requirements or business needs.
As companies look to simplify or consolidate, the time and money cost of integrations add to the already-existent complexities. While all integrations will be different due to the nature of the technology involved, our chemical customer representatives found commonality in many of the challenges that are faced with managing integrations and maintaining different interfaces:
- How do I make a business case when IT changes don’t tie directly to a profit? How can I convert efficiencies to an ROI or a business value benchmark?
- What are best practices for integrating mergers and acquisitions into SAP when there are different instances amongst the different entities?
- Is there a system or process that makes integration across various instances easier to do?
- What are some best practices for managing updates across many instances of SAP and non-SAP products?
- How do you ensure compatibility amongst all systems? And how do you continue to track this as technology changes and versions change functionality?
- How can I best understand or map the future of my technology investments across all of these instances? And how do I use this to ensure I continue to meet my function needs over the long-term?
- How to maintain the engagement of the business side during integrations and migrations?
To get answers to these and many more questions come and visit us at the
Best Practices for Chemicals Conference, being held in Houston on April 4-6, 2017 and Register Now!
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