The State of Chemicals & Materials Today From managing siloed data to navigating the complexity of diverse workflows and teams, companies in the chemicals & materials industry face significant challenges, which slow decision making and hinder productivity.
Data consistency is a major obstacle to being able to leverage data as a proprietary asset—that’s true for all industries. But it’s particularly difficult to manage the diversity of chemicals & materials workflows, which represent a multitude of scientific disciplines, including synthetic chemistry, polymer science, formulation, and process development.
Companies need to be able to make informed decisions fast. That includes the ability to visualize, analyze and collaborate across a wide variety of data sources, teams and locations, both cross-functionally and geographically. The chemicals & materials landscape adds layers of complexity, due to teams often being located around the globe and sometimes joined into one company through mergers and acquisitions. This can lead to different teams employing distinct workflows and point solutions, creating siloed data.
Plus, teams utilize complex research processes, which are not linear or standardized across the system. Frequently there are high levels of variability, where steps are not-searchable or comparable. The variety of stages of the process and actions happening within R&D makes it hard to assess and analyze the trees of experiments that lead down to a series of products. It’s hard to answer “why” one material performed better than another, and hard to link experiments together.
Add to these issues teams’ natural resistance to change and the result is a serious change management bottleneck leading to slower decision-making timelines, and negatively impacting both return on investment (ROI) and time to market.
The State of Chemicals & Materials Today
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