To stay competitive in today’s chemical industry, manufacturers must sustain a high level of operational productivity. Moreover, current issues like rapid commoditization, complex supply chains, aging assets, and increased need for dynamic operations planning make it more demanding than ever before to achieve the level of productivity that drives differentiation and innovation. Manufacturers often become locked into patterns where they’re implementing shortsighted cost-cutting measures that can adversely affect operational productivity and decrease overall market responsiveness.
To ensure you don’t fall into these traps, it’s vital that you not only understand the industrial challenges you face, but also recognize the top trends that are reshaping manufacturing. Gaining this knowledge is the first step toward building a foundation of digital transformation.
This blog post is a helpful summary of the top challenges a supply chain faces today. If you’d like to learn more about how to turn these obstacles into opportunities, please read Infor's recent executive brief for an even deeper dive into the topic.
Supply-demand unpredictability
Supply chains are mercurial. Disruptions can occur anywhere in the supply ecosystem and cause ripple effects up and down the value chain.
For instance, the rapid commoditization of the chemical industry means that customers often have numerous sources from which they can procure needed materials. If you don’t have what customers need, in the right quantity, at the price, when they want it, they can go to one of your competitors.
And because chemical manufacturers (and their customers) are often so high up in the value-chain, they can be victims of the “bullwhip effect”—small changes that happen at the “tip of the tail” (end-market) translate into major changes by the time they reach the “grip handle” (producer).
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