There is optimism amongst CEOs that the growth prospect for the chemicals industry is at a 5 year high. The shale gas revolution has driven lower stock feed cost and the construction of new facilities. A shift in global portfolio is underway, driving M&A, divestitures and joint ventures activities. Chemical companies are under pressure to innovate and create profitable growth opportunities while managing costs and compliance with the vast array of regulations. Finally, aging work forces across geographies poses challenges to skill development and employee engagement efforts.
New Technologies to Solve Today's Challenges
To address these challenges, SAP has responded with a broader range of innovations that help chemical companies to innovate and standardize so that they can innovate faster, operate more safely, quickly and engage their employees more fully. For example,
- SAP HANA in memory technology accelerates Analytics and enables smarter transaction processing.
- Cloud Solution simplifies deployment and scale rapidly for quick ROI.
- Industry Specific content and pre-configured business processes simplify and standardize implementation.
- New Fiori interface engage and empower employees like never before.
Use Cases - SAP Solutions in Actions:
Use Case 1:
A mid-size polymer producer was spun off from in a large multinational with limited time to migrate its business systems. The company used SAP best practices for chemicals for standard processes. It ran those processes on SAP Business Suite on HANA which gave it a single database with real-time analytics and it hosted the system in a SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud, significantly reducing its landscape cost.
Use Case 2:
An industrial gas company was suffering from poor PO compliance, excessive accounts payable errors, high purchasing costs and lower discounting from its vendors. Using the Ariba Collaborative Commerce Solutions, the company reduced the invoice cycle time from 14 days to 4, improved first time match rate by 50% and doubled the amount of invoices processed electronically.
Use Case 3:
A specialty chemical producer needed a complete view of its talent management and development processes worldwide. It also wanted to better engage employees and manage self-service tools to better their careers. Using SuccessFactors, the HR Cloud based Talent Management Hub, the company was able to manage its employees across 30 countries, increase e-course offerings by 15 times, enhance talent review and succession planning and substantially reduce travel cost.
We have many more stories from our unmatched customer base.
In the chemical industry, more than 90 of the top 100 global companies run SAP. More than 4,000 other SAP Customers “run better” with SAP Solutions.
Watch Don Mahoney, VP and Global Head of Chemicals, talk about these solutions in detail, here. 
Come find out more at http://www.sap.com/chemicals.