Opportunities digitalization offers
The process of generation, collection, and storage of data has never been easier and happens to be compatible with computational powers peaking at remarkably lower costs. At the same time, the digital mind-set of society has also expanded, inspiring a willingness to engage with digital technology. This has also resulted in customers having high expectations for the quality of user interfaces and the level of service.
The combination of these factors has opened up a host of new opportunities for the chemical industry. Companies can use analytics to extract top management-relevant information from the massive amounts of data that they generate. This information can then be used to improve operations and to make better-informed decisions quickly across the entire range of a chemical company’s value chain.
The potential of digital in chemicals enjoys significant excitement, just as there is about digital across society in general. Digital will have a significant impact on many areas of the chemical industry, with the potential to completely overhaul value chains, lead to higher productivity and spurring innovation, resulting in the creation of new channels to market.
Teething Issues
Once pioneers and extensive users of digital technologies, in recent years the chemicals sector has fallen behind companies in other sectors. Banking, media and retail have explored innovative ways to use digital technology to evolve their businesses—not only in altering their operations, but also in engaging end consumers and generating value. Chemical companies are now playing to catch up. As the traditional factors of competitive advantage such as access to raw materials, scale assets, process technology and market reach become common, new ways of doing business are emerging that threaten to disrupt the existing market.
The three key benefits of digitalization
There are three key areas where digitalization promises great potential: customer engagement, newer products and services, and optimization of operations. A comprehensive digital vision by early adopters to fully exploit these opportunities is vital. This will help in the transformation of the existing business to imbibe newer capabilities, platforms, gain insights using data analytics and making timely changes in business decisions to optimize the existing operating model and maximize efficiency and profits.
A strategic advantage and the way forward
For years, chemical companies have relied upon remote sensing and communications technologies for supervisory control and even data acquisition to operate their plants and oversee production processes. Improvements in the condition monitoring of critical manufacturing components has helped minimize the cost of maintenance. In fact, the main advantage brought on by digitalization is that the number of sensors and the amount of data that operators must manage is almost doubled. For improved product quality and yield quality, Chemical companies have more data now than ever before to improve final production quality and yield, while minimizing costs. On-site workers can monitor the operations of the plant to ensure they are within the design parameters, and they can see when equipment shows risks of failure—all of which helps improve plant efficiency and reliability.
