As companies implemented ERP, they experienced significant problems, including incompatibility of business-process models, translating and transferring company data, staff training, process changes, and changes in management. The limitations of early ERP implementations were apparent and motivated corporations to move toward aligning and optimizing business processes.
Advancements in hardware and middleware technologies have enabled worldwide connectivity of ERP systems. This has been critical for the chemical industry with its large number of acquisitions and consolidations. Much greater value is derived through the ability to make better business decisions and deploy business processes that benefit the entire corporation, not just a single department or function. To be successful with this alignment and optimization of business processes, corporations need to obtain excellence in interdepartmental processes, let effective and efficient business processes drive the software-application selection, and leverage existing application software. To this last point, three out of four large companies keep information on two or more applications. The conventional benefits of such an implementation yield cost savings from productivity gains in back-office functions, reductions in inventory, decreases in cycle time and service-level improvements. An example of this in the adhesives industry is Sika's (Lyndhurst, N.J.) corporate conversion to SAP R/3, which is the standard for the chemical industry for enterprise-wide ERP packages.