Analysis of current status, advantages and misunderstandings of digital transformation in chemical industry

Today's world has entered the digital era, digital technology in the media, life, economic, social, cultural and medical fields continue to expand the application and achieved remarkable results. With the accelerating changes in technological innovation, customer demand and external environmental factors, the combination of digital technology and manufacturing industry is becoming more and more close, and the digital transformation of manufacturing enterprises is also accelerating.

In recent years, due to the inherent cyclical and commoditized nature of the global chemical industry, companies have faced increasing business challenges and pressures to find new sources of profit and provide innovative solutions to demanding customers. In the past, most chemical companies have achieved sustained profit growth by optimizing asset utilization, increasing production, improving operational efficiency, and implementing optimal pricing to improve operations and finances. Today, chemical companies not only focus on improving their core business, but also regard digital transformation as one of their core business development goals.

First, the advantages of digital transformation of chemical enterprises

At present, there are widespread problems in the production management of industrial enterprises such as difficult on-site coordination, difficult information communication, difficult personnel and equipment management, difficult standard landing, poor training effect, many process changes, miscellaneous equipment models, and difficult intelligent transformation.

In the production process of some chemical enterprises, many works carried out on site still need to be recorded or registered in the office twice, and the process and specifications lack coercive means in the implementation process. It is difficult to manage a large number of data, and the workload of statistical search is huge, and it is difficult to play the real value of the data. A lot of work on site requires repeated communication and handover, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive and prone to errors. When the customer consults the production status of the order, the various departments involved in the production of the order cannot reply the relevant questions in a timely and accurate manner due to the difficult traceability of the production process, untimely information transmission, time-consuming and laborious statistical data, etc., resulting in huge communication costs.

Digital transformation refers to the use of a new generation of information technology to build a closed loop of data collection, transmission, storage, processing and feedback, open up data barriers between different levels and different industries, improve the overall operation efficiency of the industry, and build a new digital economic system. According to the prospective Industry Research Institute statistics show that the digital factory can make the time to market at least 30% earlier; By optimizing planning quality, manufacturing costs can be reduced by 13%. Digital technologies are expected to transform and generate 10 to 45 percent of industry revenues in China by 2030. With the spread of data and computing power, increasing communication within production operations and between industry value chain partners, digitization is opening up new opportunities for the entire chemical industry.

Digitalisation also taps into the value creation potential of sales and marketing. Digital investments in marketing and sales can increase the industry's average return on sales (ROS) by 2 to 4 percentage points. According to the Chemical Industry Market Research Analysis Report 2018, BASF uses advanced analytical techniques to reset the price of a portfolio of 100,000 product customers in seven core countries, based on individual risk and willingness to pay. Through a combination of analytics, capacity building and change management, the company achieved price growth of 5 to 7 percent.

Digitization has also effectively increased the efficiency of risk management. In China, after Wanhua Chemical applied the mobile management and control system, the formation of big data provided a reliable protective layer data chain for accident prevention and analysis, and realized the safe management of personnel behavior; Diversified and personalized training materials and test materials are oriented and accurately pushed. The mobile training mode enables personnel to learn anytime and anywhere and improves the flexibility of training. The safe job unit function provides more time for risk assessment before the job, facilitating job order archiving, real-time query and statistical analysis, and effectively managing non-job risks in the process.

Second, the chemical industry digital transformation status

The intelligence of the manufacturing process is the direction of the development of the manufacturing industry and the development process of intelligent manufacturing. The process attributes of the chemical industry are the most suitable for the deepening of digital transformation. Obviously, this has inherent advantages for chemical enterprises to cut into the digital stage compared with the discrete equipment based machinery industry. Therefore, digitization and informatization are the only way to realize the intelligence of the chemical industry. However, due to many factors, domestic chemical enterprises generally face the problem of low digitization degree.