The Ledger

What Makes Chemical Manufacturers Competitive?

According to McKinsey, chemical manufacturers have already invested in IT systems and infrastructure that generate enormous volumes of data. However, many have failed so far to take advantage of this mountain of potential intelligence. Data analytics tools have become exponentially more powerful and easier to use, and the most innovative businesses are putting their mountains of process, product, and other types of data to work in the chemical industry to help navigate the significant changes and volatility that are the new normal. McKinsey research found three common practices that leading chemical companies are using to utilize their data and analytics on a grand scale.

Read More at The Digitalist by SAP >

How Insights Drive Data-Driven Accounting

Businesses use data to understand how the business is performing, to manage operations, and to make key business decisions. With the accelerating pace of business today, accurate, up-to-date data is more essential than ever. Finance leaders need operational and performance data to know how their department is performing, to efficiently manage their operations, and to enable data-driven decision-making. It is imperative for companies to start modernizing their accounting functions in order to remain competitive. This starts by eliminated manual processes and digitizing operations. Once this is done, accounting and finance executives need access to performance data to improve their processes.

Read More at The Digitalist by SAP >

Strategic Planning in Today’s Volatile Business Climate

“If there’s a single theme informing the C-suite’s most pressing challenges today, it’s the unrelenting pace and scale of change.”

Businesses are facing the harsh reality that their traditional approach to finance planning is not up to the challenge of establishing assumptions, defining objectives, and allocating resources over a specific span of time. In addition to grappling with a constantly shifting business, technology, and social landscape, today’s strategists must confront more complex planning variables than ever before, while the diversity and scope of their decisions has also grown.  No one can predict the future, but today’s leaders can help shape it by understanding the long trajectories that connect it to the past. Rather than be indecisive in the face of uncertainty, leaders can consider multiple possible future scenarios and plan their next steps accordingly. By doing so, they can help to build a more dynamic and scalable business overall.

Read More at The Wall Street Journal >

Connecting the Dots Between Manufacturing Data and Insight

Today’s manufacturers have more quality data at their fingertips than ever before. Companies are now leveraging tools to collect extensive amounts of data about their production processes—across multiple lines and sites, around the clock. Real-time data quality is key to plant-floor operators because it enables them to spot manufacturing issues and inconsistencies before they magnify, make timely corrections, and determine where to focus process improvement efforts at the plant and enterprise levels. To effectively sift through the amount of data coming from the modern plant floor and find real, valuable quality intelligence, there are essential pillars that manufacturers first need to have in place: standardization, centralized data, and prioritization.

Read More at Manufacturing.Net >