Global industries continue to embrace digitalization at an ever-increasing speed.  PCI Magazine Chief Editor, Kristin Johansson, interviewed Ali Amin-Javaheri, CEO and Founder of Knowde, a digital customer experience platform, in order to gain insight surrounding digital transformation in the coatings industry.

PCI: Many global industries are quite far along in their digital transformation journey. In your opinion, where does the chemicals industry fall in this transformation process?

Amin-Javaheri: The chemicals industry is probably 15-20 years behind the rest of the world when it comes to using digital technology. Adoption has been slow, and even when companies recognize that digitalization can power their businesses and provide an amazing customer experience, they learn that building the technology to get there is not easy. 

Digitalization requires a huge capital investment, and knowledge and skills that, frankly, these companies don’t have. Suppliers and distributors take a lot longer than companies in other industries to put plans together, and in larger companies there are a lot of layers of decision making that slow the process down.

PCI: What are some of the reasons why this industry is behind others when it comes to digitalization?

Amin-Javaheri: Traditionally, the industry has relied on mobile sales teams and trade shows to get in front of customers, and that’s where it has invested the most resources. The industry hasn’t adjusted to the fact that there has been a generational shift on the buyers’ side, where formulators, R&D, and procurement professionals are getting younger and, increasingly, are looking to do more online. 

Once suppliers and distributors wake up to the understanding that their customers are online, and that they are missing out on opportunities to use their websites to generate and convert leads, they find themselves facing the biggest roadblock to digitalization: disorganized product data. They can’t begin to take advantage of digital technology until they solve this problem first.

PCI: What have been some of the key challenges in making the change to digital – for both the chemical suppliers and the companies that provide digital products?

Amin-Javaheri: Chemical company product data lives in PDFs: technical data sheets and brochures that are either not available on the internet, not easy to find or access, or kept behind a firewall. The way it’s structured, it can’t be used to push information into different internal channels, including enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) systems. Opportunities are lost because sales people can’t possibly know everything about all of the products that a company sells, and it’s impossible to provide a good customer experience.

Product information is also very complex. Every product has technical data, safety data, features, functionality, product claims, regulatory information, information about how it’s packaged and shipped – essentially 40-60 attributes for each product. Within companies, multiple product managers take different approaches to how this is structured. That’s just within one company. From company to company, those differences are multiplied, which makes the process of finding and sourcing products extremely difficult for buyers.

It’s equally challenging for companies that provide digital products. Building technology for this industry is not easy. It requires a deep amount of domain knowledge and understanding of what the market is all about. Off-the-shelf solutions don’t work; you need deep chemical industry knowledge. We hear from a lot of suppliers and distributors that have purchased a product information management (PIM) system that doesn’t work the way they expected it to, because the data feeding into it is unstructured and does not provide a single source of truth.

PCI: What benefits are both chemical companies and coatings manufacturers able to realize once product data is available digitally?

Amin-Javaheri: Getting data structured and harmonized has multiple benefits for chemical companies and distributors. Once accomplished, it doesn’t matter how the data is pushed out – through a marketplace, the company’s own website, or both – it feeds enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) systems, and powers sales enablement. It also helps these companies to deliver the amazing customer experience that users want because it enables a simpler process to search, filter, collaborate, and request samples and quotes, as well as purchase materials online. 

With access to better information, coatings formulators and R&D professionals can find what they need to innovate much faster, which helps to shorten development time and get products to market faster. Buyers can simplify the sourcing of materials, improve efficiency, and source new suppliers and alternative materials when supply chain disruptions occur.

PCI: How do you see the digital marketplace experience evolving?

Amin-Javaheri: Certainly artificial intelligence (AI) will play a larger role in the future. Today, the primary benefit of AI is helping structure product data. But at some point it will create an amazing discovery and chat experience for users. Instead of using today’s search methods – even with the advanced filters that are available – users will have the ability to type in what they want, and get instant results. When they have a technical question, instead of waiting to hear back from someone, they’ll have an avatar that is smarter than today’s average sales rep.