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Digital transformation

There remains an immense but relatively unexplored potential for advanced data analytics and digital technologies to transform the chemical industry. Today, digital tools and technologies present an economically feasible solution for extracting more efficiencies from incumbent processes and designing novel products and processes. Due to the convergence of accelerating improvements such as advances in sensors, cognitive computing, and analytics, significant progress can be expected in three areas in 2022: data availability, data processing, and engineering and materials research.

By leveraging advanced data analytics and digital technologies, chemical companies can become more agile, innovative, responsive, and efficient. Per a recent Deloitte survey, 62% of the chemical industry respondents believe that advanced data analytics and digital technologies will potentially create the most impact when it comes to delivering a better user experience in 2022. The journey will likely pose various challenges, but how companies respond to these challenges can determine the winners and losers in 2022 and beyond. A properly designed and optimally deployed data and digital strategy may represent one of the biggest-ever opportunities for the chemical industry in the post–COVID-19 world, primarily when a clear business strategy drives it.

Customer-centricity

Chemical businesses today are expected to meet customers’ needs and expectations at every interaction in return for customer loyalty. The ability to deliver this could depend on the extent to which customer-centricity is embedded within every link in the value chain in the chemical business. Especially in light of the convergence of many industries that are rebranding and repositioning themselves, customer-centricity should play an instrumental role in staying a step ahead of the competition. Chemical companies are likely to leverage digital technologies to enable automated trend sensing and social media scanning (using text analytics) to identify broader market trends and customer requirements. This customer-centric innovation, which solicits real-time feedback through customer engagement tools, could help improve the scope, scale, and returns of R&D efforts.

Chemical companies could consider changing their approach to innovation to better respond to current, unique disruptions more effectively. As companies from outside the industry enter the fray and compete with established industry leaders and end-market demand shifts due to consumer preferences, businesses should focus on realigning their innovation strategy and efforts. To address the still-prevalent disconnect between the accelerating pace of change in the marketplace and inertia of the innovation process, chemical companies are likely to collaborate with new startups and platforms that can accumulate vast amounts of material knowledge from varied sources into a single, reliable, searchable format and leverage machine learning algorithms to develop innovations quickly and efficiently.

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