The specialty chemicals industry stands at a crossroads. One path leads to a continuing world of siloed data, manual processes, and limited insights. The other leads to a new frontier of seamless collaboration, data-driven decisions, and accelerated innovation.

The benefits of digital transformation to an organization—enhanced operational efficiency, accelerated innovation, and improved regulatory compliance and sustainability—are clear. R&D departments use digital tools to manipulate data and simulate chemical processes which predict the properties of new materials, reducing the time and costs of experimental trials. Insights by scientists are enhanced with the visualization of vast amounts of data provided with state-of-the-art digital tools.

But implementation of digital tools into many organizations isn’t always possible because of high costs, integration challenges, and a lack of purpose-built tools. The specialty chemicals industry also faces challenges in scaling digital initiatives.

It’s a widely held view that digital transformation still has a long way to go in specialty chemicals, to achieve full adoption within R&D, throughout individual companies, and across the industry as a whole.

To validate the assumption that specialty chemical companies haven’t fully embraced digital transformation, we partnered with Coatings World for an informal survey. After analyzing more than 200 responses from selected chemical industry staff, here’s what we learned.
 

Survey Results and Analysis

Most, if not all, specialty chemical companies are using digital technologies in some form, but many are still inadequate to meet today’s needs. Most are also using their digital tools in silos, limiting information sharing and collaboration. Simply put, the specialty chemicals industry is lagging in digital transformation.

Key insights from the survey:

• Excel continues to be widely used for data management and analysis despite its limitations, particularly for R&D use cases, leading to inefficiencies and missed insights. 
• Significant time and resources remain sunk in low-value administration and maintenance that could be handled digitally, freeing time to focus on value-added work. 
• Disconnected systems and incompatible file formats make it difficult for researchers to share information and work together effectively, across time zones and around the globe.
• Lack of purpose-built tools designed for the unique needs of specialty chemicals R&D hinders productivity and innovation.

Our analysis of the survey responses showed:

1. The current digital solutions commonly used in the specialty chemicals industry are inadequate for the complex, collaborative tasks needed in today’s demanding and competitive landscape.

a. Manual data entry and data transfer between disparate systems drains productivity and opens companies to security risks. To collaborate with teammates, for example, researchers may be required to search the literature with SciFinder or Google Scholar in a public browser; access past experimental data from their digital notebooks on a local server; and email with collaborators through an academic account.  

b. Reliance on non-purpose-built tools like spreadsheets for complex data processing is error-prone and unsustainable as data volumes grow. 

c. General-purpose software doesn’t have the capability for visualizing specialty chemical molecules, reactions, and insights from tests and experiments; nor the ability to support complex, multi-parameter experiments. 

d. Identifying trends, optimizing processes and making data-driven decisions requires advanced analytics that are difficult to implement with legacy architecture. 
 

2. Integration of digital tools is a significant barrier to digital transformation.

a. Incompatible data formats and lack of interoperability lead to fragmented workflows and duplicated efforts. 

b. Lack of connectivity between instruments, software, and databases hinders the ability to gain a holistic view of any project. 

c. Complex production processes make integrating new digital solutions into existing systems difficult. 

d. Evolving data governance and regulatory requirements combined with fragmented legacy architecture makes compliance more challenging than it needs to be. 

e. Ensuring security for large volumes of sensitive data, including proprietary formulas and customer information during rollout of new systems is a primary concern. Security and IP concerns arise with the use of email and consumer tools for scientific data exchange. 
 

3. The high cost of deployment can be prohibitive even to companies who want to digitally transform.

a. Implementing digital technologies requires significant upfront investment in hardware, software, and infrastructure, which isn’t always possible, especially for small and mid-sized companies. 

b. Determining the return on investment (ROI) for digital initiatives can be difficult, when benefits are primarily qualitative. 

With all of these issues at play, how can the specialty chemicals industry move digital transformation forward? Cloud-native SaaS solutions can provide cost-effective options to help companies overcome these challenges.
 

Revvity Signals helps drive digital transformation in the specialty chemicals industry.

Integrating Tools and Data

Revvity Signals’ software offers an integrated, intuitive, and intelligent data management platform that empowers R&D teams to develop next-generation formulations more efficiently, collaboratively, and with better risk management. Advanced cloud-based electronic lab notebooks (ELNs) like Signals Notebook and specialty software like Signals ChemDraw provide researchers with access to all their data and software tools in a single interface that extends secure connectivity across devices.

Overcoming Limited Legacy Systems

Revvity Signals’ solutions help overcome the limitations of legacy systems and processes that hinder modern, data-driven R&D. By leveraging our advanced technology and software, industrial chemists can accelerate the ideation phase of product development. Our solutions make it fast and easy to search existing data across individual scientists' past work, colleagues' work, and published literature, enabling a unified approach to digital transformation that automates workflows, enables collaboration, and harnesses advanced analytics.

Freeing Up Time for Innovation

Revvity Signals' purpose-built, cloud-native platforms unify data, automate workflows, enable collaboration, and harness advanced analytics to address the challenges faced in digital transformation. Features like templating and tagging save time and ensure maximum use of existing data, allowing researchers to focus on the most important aspect of their work: product innovation.

To find out more about how you can streamline your data-sharing processes and unlock the full potential of your specialty chemicals projects through digital transformation, download our 2024 e-book on digital transformation: The New Frontier.