Digital will help Chemical companies transform how they engage with customers

Chemical companies have an opportunity to realize significant value by transforming how they engage with customers and strengthening real-time technical service.

In today’s environment, most chemical companies have arms-length relationships with their customers, focused on selling, managing orders, resolving quality issues, and facilitating ad-hoc activities like new product qualification efforts. Products are manufactured to exacting specifications and delivered per negotiated terms, only to be forgotten about once they transfer out of the supplier’s inventory.

Now, consider a few realities: first, products don’t always work as expected. Evidence shows that up to 3% of supplied products fail when applied/mixed/consumed, creating costly scrap, rework, or downtime in the customers’ operations. In other cases, products actually perform better than expected. In today’s world, technical service engineers engage with customers to resolve issues, minimize disruptions, and gain customer insights on technical matters. However, this approach is both costly and ineffective. Up to 1% of sales is frequently spent on technical service, yet problems recur, and critical insights rarely make it back to the R&D lab. Product development is also challenging; new products are launched every year, but a significant number fail to meet commercial expectations.

The time has come for chemical companies to rethink how they interact with their customers.

Emerging digital technologies can improve this situation and create new business opportunities. Instead of using technical service to minimize pain, companies can now partner with their customers to collect and interpret vast amounts of information in real time. The result? An ecosystem of rich data that predicts product quality, improves technical service, and enables faster development and launch of new products. Even more significant, this customer connectivity will enable companies to evolve their business models towards selling outcomes rather than kilograms of product.

Read the entire whitepaper here.