India’s Chemical Industry and the Data Challenge

The chemical industry is in the middle of a transition phase where Asia has emerged as the new global supply center. While this offers a sea of opportunity for emerging markets like India and the Middle East, the chemical suppliers in India must address some key issues to ensure uncompromised efficiency. The primary among these is data management.

Why Data Management Matters?

A robust data management practice contributes significantly to reducing errors and multiplying efficiency. In the digital age, data is instrumental in improving business health. Organizations or companies that employ efficient management practices enjoy benefits like:

• Accurate decision making.
• Identify supply chain loopholes faster and better.
• Effectively manage and control valuable business assets

Data Management Challenges in The Indian Chemical Industry

Emerging markets like India are dominated primarily by small and medium chemical companies. As such these companies do not have the resources and capacity to put into place an IT infrastructure that can captures process and produce meaningful business insights from raw business data. Chemical companies sit on a mountain of complex multilateral data ranging from government compliance, supplier contracts, logistics to manufacturing and operations.

Further, data management challenges are not restricted to capturing and organizing alone but also to employ the right technology tools and human expertise to draw context based insights.

What Does Context Driven Insights Mean?

Demand and supply in the chemical industry are driven primarily by crude oil prices. Crude oil prices impact production cost of chemical companies directly which means managing inventories for profits amidst the daily variations of crude oil prices is an Achilles' heel for most chemical companies.

While a prompt IT infrastructure can help in extracting and refining of data on a real-time basis, turning them into insights still requires expert supervision. It would to tough an ask from small and medium scale chemical players to adopt an all-inclusive data management and data analytics solution on their own.

The Solution

A welcome solution for chemical participants in new emerging markets is online digital aggregators. Digital B2B marketplaces are helping enterprises of all scale and size with data insights that add value and efficiency to chemical supply chains. Platform users can find chemical business data of all types and size like the list of chemicals exported fromIndia, list of chemical suppliers, dealers, etc. Last but not least, chemical players can track and find new emerging markets, engage with customers faster as well as be part of an ever-growing online chemical community.