Chemicals

The competitive landscape of today’s chemical industry is changing fast. One of the many challenges that companies in this sector have is the need to get their supply chains right. They must maintain focus on costs and, at the same time, be agile enough to deal with demanding customers and volatile global markets.

Historically most chemical companies have built their supply chain around their manufacturing processes. The aim was to keep production costs down by maximizing asset utilization, optimizing batch sizes and production runs and pushing product out to the market. This strategy was successful in a world of relatively stable growth and predictable demand. As times have changed, however, a new supply chain paradigm is required.

ISSUES

Set against the complexities of volatile demand, plant availability, plant equity, regulations and many more, the planning task is enormous.
In general the Supply Chain Planning is done by using a variant of MRP functionality in the ERP platform. The problem is that such systems are blind to rapid changes in demand, customer priorities, maintenance, breakdowns, shifts, materials supply dynamics, etc.

To be safe, planners have to compensate by holding more materials and finished products inventory than needed. What is more, to be responsive real-time planning is often done outside the ERP system. This is time consuming and may be lead to inefficient and even inaccurate plans.

SOLUTION

ICRON Technologies enables leaders in the chemical industry to take a comprehensive approach to supply-chain management and to deliver positive effects that are both rapid and long lasting. ICRON Technologies provides an integrated platform consisting out of a set of intelligent tools and mathematical models that support the planning and scheduling function. The ICRON solution is fast, proven robust and compatible with any kind of ERP system. The ICRON platform has proven to be able to help companies to stay agile and adaptable to market and industry demands.

VALUE

In our experience, companies that invest in their supply chain capabilities see substantial results— typically 5 to 10 percent improvement in service levels, 10 to 30 percent reductions in supply-chain costs and 10 to 20 percent reductions in inventory.

Beyond these bottom-line benefits, increased agility and market responsiveness also allow companies to capture new sales opportunities, driving top-line supply chain growth. ICRON Technologies has proved it is possible to perform well across all these dimensions. Done right, supply-chain capabilities are a true source of competitive advantage.

CONTACT US TO LEARN MORE ABOUT HOW WE CAN HELP YOU

ICRON has some characteristics that makes it a unique solution for the Chemicals Industry

• 100% Fit: ICRON is an amazingly flexible solution that is modelled around the current business processes. ICRON can be morphed to any company environment leaving the core process and by which the companies is able to create its competitive advantage intact.
• Unified Long- term, Capacity Planning & Scheduling: ICRON provides an integrated solution that allows an intelligent interaction between Long-term Planning, Mid-term Capacity Planning, and Short-term Scheduling and Optimization. Within one single platform the company can automatically plan on a strategic, operational and tactical level
• Distributed Planning: ICRON works with a distributed planning model that allows planners on different locations to work simultaneously in one planning environment. Planners can provide input on the planning and the plans that are made bottom up are integrated on the shared platform. If desired the new updated and integrated planning is almost instantly released to all plan locations.
• Real-time Scenario Planning: ICRON allows planners generate automatically optimization plans and after that run ‘what-if’ scenarios. Scenarios are simply made in a user friendly interface by dragging and dropping on a plan board. In a matter of seconds new scenarios can be created and made visible on the plan board.