ERP for the Chemical Industry: Why you need more reporting than just financials

As a company active in the chemical industry, as a distributor or producer, you must be able to provide answers to key questions on products or even on molecules. How much did you purchase or manufacture? What did you ship to customers in your country, or perhaps to other countries inside or outside the EU?  You do these things not only because some of it has become mandatory over the years, but also because it is a best practice.   

Systems tuned for the specific financial, such as margin control, and operational needs of the chemical industry have moved from nice-to-have to must-have. You want to report on the products you buy, manufacture, and deliver to your customers.  You want to understand which products are in stock, how many of them contain potentially hazardous substances.  You want to quickly see whether you are within internal or external volume or mass thresholds.  You must have reporting flexibility from data stored in (hopefully) one ERP system.

Managing this information can be hard work if your data is in siloed systems or spreadsheets.  It can be hard work if your ERP is not able to capture some critical attributes of your end products, intermediates, and raw materials.  You were probably OK with some potential system shortcomings in the past, but as reporting requirements have grown incrementally, there is a need to work with the data and not spend ages collecting it and producing reports from it.  For example, you may be contemplating questions like:

• How easily can we report on purchases of biocides, production of biocides?
• Can ...

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