Driving Business Process Improvement Using Best Practices for the Chemicals Industry
Kraton Polymers manufactures chemicals which enhance the performance of numerous products including adhesives, lubricants, asphalt and footwear. The company wants to remain focused on delivering exciting new innovations to its customers, drive increases in productivity, and improve the quality of its products and services. It is challenged with continually rising costs for raw materials, increased price competition and difficult market conditions in some of its end uses.
Kraton is a leading global performance polymer company and is the world’s largest producer of styrenic block copolymers (SBCs), a family of products whose chemistry was pioneered by Kraton over forty years ago.
SBCs are highly-engineered thermoplastic elastomers, which enhance the performance of numerous products by delivering a variety of attributes, including greater flexibility, resilience, strength, durability and process-ability.
Kraton polymers are used in a wide range of applications including adhesives, coatings, consumer and personal care products, sealants, lubricants, medical, packaging, automotive, paving, roofing, and footwear products.
Kraton has the leading position in nearly all of its core markets and is the only producer of SBCs with global manufacturing capability. Its production facilities are located in the United States, The Netherlands, Germany, France, Brazil, and Japan.
The Business Challenges
The chemicals industry has the perpetual challenge of being extremely sensitive to increases in raw material costs and continually pressured by competitors to drive down prices. Kraton is no exception and has felt the squeeze with the rapid spike in the cost of petrochemicals it needs to manufacture polymers. Additionally, the high cost of fuel has had an impact on market conditions for the companies that purchase from Kraton.
In response, Kraton Polymers adopted an initiative to improve overall productivity at one of its production sites in the USA and selected Atos Origin to support the project.
Our Solution
To improve plant capabilities and to remain competitive in today’s global marketplace, Kraton developed new work processes for the selected production site. Atos Origin then recommended changes to the existing IT platform to enable improved support of the new best practice work processes.
We deployed senior-level SAP consultants to provide advice to Kraton regarding industry best practices and how to best support these more efficient processes with SAP. We selected Atos Origin consultants with knowledge of the Chemicals business as well as SAP modular experience. This core team was supplemented with consultants from Atos Origin’s SAP support practice. Since the team had knowledge of the business as well as knowledge of the existing solution, the project team quickly developed a quality solution.
The Results
Kraton realized efficiencies that contributed immediate cost savings of 20 percent. The best-practices solution designed specifically for the Chemicals sector is expected to bring even more benefits over the long term.