Every chemical and ingredient company wants to grow their EBIT faster, but they struggle to do it. It's because their operations - from sales to procurement - are not as efficient as they should be. Sales teams should sell the entire basket of products. Technical service should share the entire organization's knowledge with every customer. Regulatory should provide the answer in minutes. Procurement should manage the tail more effectively. Strong operating companies do these things. The root of the problem is data.
The big productivity gains will come when people realize the importance of clean data. Why is it not already clean? There’s a lot of data that is not on computers. There is a lot of data that is only partially digitized in PDF and XLS. There’s a lot of dirty data sitting in many different systems. Even something as basic as the name of a product is inconsistent - every system uses different names, labels, classifiers and conventions. The process of digitizing the company’s data is a prerequisite to transformation.