Chemical companies were early adopters of SAP. But while many suffered the speed bumps of early ERP implementations, it’s been a generation since most of these companies have undergone a major transformation project. The current state of the market suggests that some carry the project genetic markers that make them highly susceptible to disaster. The good news is these companies can learn and derive benefits from our research on the wave of catastrophic IT project failures from the past eight years.

Understanding why major transformational programs fail, what contributed to some poor decision-making, and what steps can be proactively taken to mitigate risks is a great first step in planning and implementing a successful program.

This presentation will address:

• Case studies of recent project failures, what went wrong, and what they have in common
• The one thing to get right before embarking on an SAP S/4HANA® transformation
• Four early decisions that set the stage of success or failure
• Three practices to improve the quality of project decision-making

Key Business Benefits:

• Support for the justification for the appropriate contingency: Typically, when companies take on big projects, they tend to throw in a flat rate of contingency, like 15 percent. The appropriate level of contingency for a big ERP transformation program is actually far higher, like 30 percent. This is often hard to justify to an executive team in the planning phase, but we will show methods we’ve taught companies to use to justify this higher contingency.
• Reduce the probability of disruptive implementations: When contingencies get set too low, project teams typically take shortcuts in order to make their budget. As a result, they’ll not execute on activities that might have been expected. For example, a team that only tests twice to save money instead of three times as planned will likely have more problems as a result of skipping the third test. We will show a case study of a company that ended up taking shortcuts due to their budgetary constraints and had issues which were much greater than ever imagined.
• Increase the probability of the achievement of anticipated program benefits: Those shortcuts taken to go-live early could limit anticipated program benefits. When capabilities in the system were left out and training to go-live was omitted as a result of the budget, we will show how this shortcutting affected a project’s benefits.

An innovation competition or innovation program might sound more at home in a company headquartered in Silicon Valley than a chemical manufacturer, but at AdvanSix, we are innovating together to generate new ideas for how we improve. In 2018, we hosted our first two innovation competitions, kicking off our Innovating Together program. The competition results in four ideas that address long-standing business challenges. We are excited that the innovation teams are proceeding forward to implement these ideas, and we are looking forward to results in 2019.

Each competition involved two days of training on innovation tools facilitated by our partner, Systematic Inventive Thinking. Over the course of the two competitions, 14 diverse teams of four or five individuals were given a unique business challenge, ranging from quality issues on the shop floor to logistical inefficiencies to manual or ineffective processes such as manual operator rounds. Participants were selected from each site, line of business, and function to form diverse teams. Business challenges were submitted by employees and selected by a cross-functional steering committee. During the competitions, each team generated eight to 20 ideas for their challenge, selected their best idea, and presented in an unconventional way their idea to a panel of judges from the AdvanSix leadership teams. A winning team from each competition received cash prizes; all participants voted on “people’s choice” awards, selecting the best use of innovation tools and other fun prizes.

Key Business Benefits:

• Use-case on how to implement your own program
• Increase the learning and diversity of ideas within your own organization
• Challenge the way you normally look at problems, allowing new solutions to emerge

To be or not to be…Organizations running SAP are thinking about or planning to move to SAP S/4HANA® in the near future. However, the question of greenfield (fresh implementation) vs. brownfield (migration) is a constant debate. This is not an IT question but rather a business one. The workshop will explore how to establish your business maturity for the digital change, how to adjust and prepare for it, and ultimately decide whether greenfield or brownfield is best for your organization. In addition, you will learn what your organization can do now in the meantime to prepare the business for SAP S/4HANA® by optimizing the business processes, and in doing so, begin the journey to be an innovative, world-class supply chain. Lastly, we will discuss how to pay for a large portion of the SAP S/4HANA conversion with hidden savings and value in your existing supply chain.

Key Business Benefits:

• Know how to measure the business maturity of the organization for SAP S/4HANA and future technologies.
• Understand the various options that exist between greenfield and brownfield initiatives and the impact they have on the organization.
• Understand what can be done now to better align demand, MRP, and supply operations to prepare the business for the digital (SAP S/4HANA) change while significantly improving product delivery.
• Gain benefits and savings from maximizing the current SAP and business processes to help pay for the SAP S/4HANA conversion and in doing so prepare the business for the technology.

Like most chemical companies in 2018, KMG Chemicals was faced with severe freight cost spikes.  This industry wide issue was caused by a significant reduction in national available driver hours as a result of a shortage of drivers and the regulatory changes of the ELD mandate. Due to this, KMG Chemicals was forced to look internally to figure out how to become a shipper of choice and cost effectively attract drivers and carriers by becoming an easier company to do business with.

After the research found that one significant concern of drivers nationally is the amount of work hours they waste waiting to be loaded and unloaded, KMG Chemicals immediately sought out how to reduce driver dwell time at our highest volume plant.

In this session, you will discover how KMG Chemicals used design thinking to identify critical logistics constraints that directly impacted drivers’ dwell time, and digitized those constraints by building an SAP Cloud Platform app that integrated with an external TMS to improve the driver appointment scheduling process, give real-time information on driver arrival and departure information, track our tendered loads on demand, and reduce driver dwell time and overall freight costs.