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You may have heard the term: “Never change a running system (or machine)." If you are German or have lived in Germany for quite some time I would be quite surprised if you have never come across it. This term is in fact a German pseudo-Anglicism. It comes from the expression: “Never change a winning team.” That has a different relevance after all.

You might remember the quotes I mentioned about Zetschke, Darwin and that managing partner from a large consulting firm in Part 2 of this series blog: Change is an integral part of our lives and it is needed to stay competitive. It is needed to survive.

We wanted to spend some time talking about the current status quo in the order-to-cash and procure-to-pay processes within the petrochemical industry.

Interactions between buyers and sellers in our industry typically rely on tools and techniques that have been around for decades and they have not changed very much – for good reason! The standard sales process is fairly simple: when a buyer needs raw material to produce a product or provide a service, they will contact the manufacturer or distributor of that product primarily by phone, email, or fax, get a quote, or several, work out the terms and try and come to some sort of an agreement.

In Part 2 of our blog series: Digitalization in Petrochemicals, we would like to give you a little more detailed view on online portals in practice.

In the perfect situation as a supplier, you would run your own e-commerce platform and have it linked with your own ERP system in order to efficiently manage customer master data, inventory management, contract management, credit management, the documentation, shipping pricing and conditions, order and shipment tracking, and last but not least the invoicing. This setup would be further connected to an independent online marketplace.

When we first came up with the idea for Kemgo, over two years ago, there was very limited information that we could find around digitalization in the petrochemical industry (unless it was around innovation on the product development side or the startups we saw at the beginning of the century).