From Goals to Action, From Data to Insight: How Intcube EPM Infuses Management Resilience into the Chemical Industry_Trends_北京智达方通科技有限公司

In recent years, the chemical industry has consistently faced the severe challenge of structural overcapacity, with profit margins for some products under continuous pressure. Simultaneously, increasingly stringent environmental regulations, rising safety investments, coupled with frequent fluctuations in raw material costs, have persistently tested corporate profitability. To survive and develop, the industry is accelerating the use of digital tools to strengthen internal capabilities. Many enterprises have begun deploying more sophisticated EPM systems, striving to integrate production and operational data, making the efficiency of cost control, project execution, and equipment maintenance "visible and manageable." In this process, precise, data-driven performance management will become the core engine for enterprises to overcome technological bottlenecks, address environmental and cost pressures, and build sustainable competitiveness.

Core Challenges Facing the Chemical Industry in EPM at the Current Stage

● Disconnect Between Strategy and Operations

Budgeting and planning are still predominantly led by finance departments and often fail to be effectively translated into actionable, monitorable action targets and KPIs for frontline departments such as production, sales, and R&D. This leads to the gradual attenuation of strategic objectives during implementation, resulting in misalignment between performance evaluation and strategic direction.

● Data Silos and Business-Finance Barriers

The vast amount of production real-time data, supply chain data, equipment energy consumption data, and financial data generated by the chemical industry is scattered across different systems, lacking effective integration and fusion mechanisms. This makes it difficult to form a complete value view spanning "raw material procurement - production - inventory - sales - collection," hindering genuine profitability analysis and root-cause tracing.

● Insufficient Agility in Planning and Forecasting

Traditional annual budget cycles are long and adjustments are difficult, making it challenging to respond to sharp fluctuations in chemical raw material prices and rapid changes in market demand. Furthermore, there is a lack of dynamic simulation and rolling forecasting capabilities based on multiple scenarios (e.g., price, capacity, demand changes), often causing management decisions to lag behind market shifts.

● Coarse Granularity in Cost Accounting and Management

Especially in process industries, accurately allocating costs for joint products, by-products, and precisely distributing energy and manufacturing expenses is a significant challenge. Cost accounting often remains at the workshop or unit level, failing to drill down to specific products, grades, or even batches. This results in pricing and product portfolio decisions lacking accurate data support.

● Insufficient Integration of Non-Financial Indicators

Performance management is overly reliant on financial results, with insufficient attention paid to key driver non-financial indicators such as safety, overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), quality, R&D project progress, and employee skills. These are often not effectively integrated into the performance evaluation system, which is detrimental to long-term sustainable development.

Intcube EPM: Solutions Focused on Chemical Industry Business Scenarios

By deeply integrating the characteristics and business processes of the chemical industry, the Intcube EPM system is committed to solving common problems in the performance management of chemical enterprises. It helps companies integrate data and information scattered across various departments to build a unified and clear operational panorama. This enables managers at different levels to make faster, more accurate decisions based on consistent facts, driving chemical enterprises towards data-driven precise decision-making and operational excellence.

● Translating Strategic Goals into Actionable Operational Indicators

The Intcube EPM system supports the automatic decomposition and assignment of corporate-level strategy down to specific production units. For example, for a goal like "reduce annual production costs by 3%," the system can translate it into clear, measurable daily tasks at the production line level, such as "increase first-grade product rate to 99.5%" or "improve key raw material utilization by 1.5%." Frontline managers can view the progress of their assigned indicators in real-time through the system, ensuring corporate strategy moves from paper plans to concrete actions in daily operations.

● Breaking Down Business and Financial Data Barriers

The Intcube system enables interoperability between business systems (production, procurement, sales) and financial accounting systems. It can automatically capture actual material consumption and energy usage data from production lines and accurately match it to corresponding product costs. Consequently, finance personnel can quickly obtain realistic profit analysis results without manual allocation estimates, while business personnel can intuitively understand the impact of their operations on the final financial outcome.

● Embedded Price Linkage Models for Dynamic Rolling Forecasts

Fluctuations in chemical raw material prices and market demand are industry norms. The Intcube EPM system provides flexible calculation tools. When the price of a major raw material suddenly rises, procurement and production managers can use the system to quickly simulate the impact on overall profit of adjusting product mix ratios or partially substituting materials. Sales departments can then dynamically optimize order-taking strategies and quotations based on this, achieving rolling profit forecasts on a weekly/monthly basis to respond efficiently to market changes.

● Establishing a Closed-Loop Management Linkage Between HSE, Equipment, and Financial Performance

The system incorporates indicators such as safety inspection completion rate, major hazard rectification rate, and unplanned equipment downtime into the performance scorecards of departments and plants. It automatically tracks trends in these indicators and sets up warning mechanisms. More importantly, the system establishes indicator linkage rules. For example, when repair frequency for equipment in a specific area increases abnormally, the system issues timely alerts, helping managers intervene proactively to avoid potential large-scale production disruptions or safety incidents, thereby advancing risk control.

Practical Implementation: Assisting Chemical Enterprises in Achieving Scientific Budget Control

When a large chemical conglomerate's various business departments prepared expense budgets, the lack of clear, recognized data benchmarks often led to insufficient reasonableness in budget figures and disconnection from actual operations. To address this, the Intcube project team innovatively introduced a "Historical Optimal Value" control mechanism into the system design. This automatically uses the optimal expense data from the past three years as the upper limit for new budget preparation, ensuring the reasonableness and scientific basis of the budget from the outset.

In this project, facing challenges including adaptation to the domestic innovation (Xinchuang) environment and a tight 1.5-month timeline, the project team collaborated closely with the client. They bypassed internal testing phases and directly invited key users to conduct budget pre-preparation work in real business scenarios, efficiently resolving issues and ensuring the system's timely launch. Ultimately, the client's budget forms were significantly streamlined, and data entry efficiency greatly improved. All group subsidiaries achieved unified preparation logic, taking data quality and consolidation efficiency to a new level. The newly created project library budget module achieved precise linkage between budgeting and project management.

Intcube has rich practical experience in this field. The earlier comprehensive budget project implemented for SDIC Xinjiang Luobupo Potassium Salt Co., Ltd. (SDIC Luobupo) similarly demonstrated the deep application value of an EPM system in a complex chemical enterprise. By optimizing the comprehensive budget management system, the project helped SDIC Luobupo rebuild its budget model and analysis framework and efficiently integrate multiple business systems. This not only significantly increased the speed and accuracy of budget preparation but also, by strengthening the linkage between capital budgets and business execution, achieved true business-finance integration, providing robust support for the enterprise's strategic decision-making.

The Intcube EPM system provides practical and actionable solutions for the performance management field in the chemical industry. By translating strategic goals into specific, actionable indicators for the front line, breaking down business-finance data barriers, and establishing flexible rolling forecast mechanisms, the system effectively addresses common management challenges in the industry, assisting chemical enterprises of various scales in achieving refined operations. The Intcube EPM system can deeply understand and resolve core pain points in the budgeting and performance management of chemical enterprises. Whether it's building a scientific budget baseline, coping with tight delivery schedules, or achieving group-wide unified control and business-finance integration, it provides practical, effective, and impactful solutions. It is a reliable partner for chemical enterprises on their journey towards refined and intelligent management.