Through a research period of four months, Eventful Conferences has conducted extensive interviews with 50+ chemical industry companies, and held two roundtable events in key chemical industry locations – Philadelphia, PA and Houston, TX. The intention of the research is to summarize the most common and critical challenges that the industry must address – crucial to their success. These pain points have been identified by the industry during the roundtables and throughout the interviews.
The Best Practices for Chemicals Conference will strive to address each challenge, pain point and trend by providing solution-oriented presentations, backed by specific evidence and packaged to provide the audience with clear takeaways on how to achieve similar results.
In this issue we will discuss the importance of Analytics and Reporting as a foundation for making sound decisions in real-time. If you missed or would like to revisit the previous entries in our series, please follow the links below.
Strategic Imperatives for the Chemical Industry - Part 1: Mergers, Acquisitions & Divestitures
Strategic Imperatives for the Chemical Industry - Part 2: Digitizing the Chemical Enterprise
- Analytics and Reporting
Having sound data to take meaningful action was the thread most common to the various issues and concerns brought up by our chemical industry representatives. The need for data accuracy to drive decision making with standardization and transparency was stressed by all participants in the roundtables and in the interviews. Further, all recognized this as a key point of competitive advantage – that the ability to best leverage data would open up significant possibilities by showing areas for improvement and opportunities for cost savings. Data analysis must encompass simulation capabilities so we can stop getting known answers to known questions. ‘What if’ scenarios will lead to a deeper understanding of the business.
Incidentally, analytics and reporting were also identified as areas needing improvement. Reports are only as good as the data imported into them, and laborious, manual collection processes increase the likelihood of errors and slow down the decision-making processes that rely on the information provided. Improving inputs is an important part of identifying and leveraging the possible competitive advantages found in the compiled data. Without this, our chemical industry representatives agreed, “we would just be making bad decisions faster.”
- How can I take my company from dashboards and reports to action items and plans? How do I integrate our data into our business model?
- How do I take my analytics from average to transformative? How can we go from reactive to predictive using my reporting tools?
- How can I best assimilate data from any source?
- What are some ways that I can avoid bad inputs to the system? What are ways to reduce manual input altogether? How do I automate and with what tools or equipment?
- How can I best provide an entire picture without providing a huge data dump?
- How can I get to 1 KPI without manual manipulation?
- What are the best practices for ensuring security and integrity of my analytics?
- What are some ways to best impart the importance of analytics and business decisions to employees/users? How can I ensure maximum user adoption?
- Can I use analytics and leverage my system to reduce individual workloads, or people costs altogether?
To get answers to these and many more questions come and visit us at the
Best Practices for Chemicals Conference, being held in Houston on April 4-6, 2017!
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To keep track on our conversations around the Chemical Industry, please follow the tag "Chemicals"
