Digital Meets Chemical: Innovate or Evaporate

At a time when the post-Cold War progress fueled by competitive markets, globalization, and innovation has lost some luster, global growth is shifting, disruption is accelerating, and societal tensions are rising. Confronting these dynamics will also help you craft a better strategy and forge a brighter future.

While the globalization of digital products and services is surging, traditional trade and financial flows have stalled, moving us beyond globalization. Digitization, machine learning, and the life sciences are advancing to redefine what companies do and where industry boundaries lie. We’re not just being invaded by a few technologies but experiencing a combinatorial technology explosion. Ensuring alignment between a company’s digital and its corporate strategy is one of the factors differentiating winners and losers – a reminder that leading today requires tough choices about big, disruptive forces.

What are the major opportunities from digital in chemicals, and what must leaders do to capture them? Digitization is enabling competition that pressures revenue and profit growth. It also is creating ways to improve performance through supply-chain, product, process, and service improvements. Digitization could improve EBITDA margins 8 – 13 percentage points and thus create as much as a trillion dollars in value for the chemical makers worldwide.

Companies can use advanced analytics to extract management-relevant information from the large amounts of unstructured data that they generate. This information can then be used to improve how plants are run and to make better-informed and speedier decisions across the full range of a chemical company’s business processes. In the wider world, the chemical industry is an essential supplier to myriad of other industries, and so digital change is in turn translating to opportunities and challenges for chemical companies.

Join us for a discussion on digital and the chemical-industry value chain dynamics and the patterns in its end markets, how digital could affect business processes, and the innovative business models that industry leaders must adopt to not just survive but thrive in this fast-changing environment.