For all their heterogeneity, many chemical businesses show commonalities that allow them to be typified. In the following, we will refer to these types for the architecture of value creation as ‘operating models’. The formation of operating models reflects a learning curve that, in Camelot’s case, is based on more than 400 supply chain transformation projects in companies in the chemical and related process industries.

By defining such a model, in a sense an archetype (basic model) for a large group of real-life manifestations of the distribution channels, the production network, the supply chain, and the management of value flows, management can

• Assigning a common basic model to various individual businesses and thus providing well-founded support for decisions on divisional structures, pooling of supply chain competencies, etc.
• Quickly identify deviations by comparing the actual supply chain with the basic model and scrutinize them for usefulness. Improvement potentials become visible much faster than with conventional supply chain assessments, which only analyze the individual company for its strengths and weaknesses or use benchmarks whose comparability remains questionable.
• Recognize the interactions between supply chain management and distribution, production, and value flows.
• Take a holistic approach to supply chain transformation, rather than limiting itself to incremental changes. This is especially true in the case of disruptive changes, such as post-merger integrations, spin-offs, restructurings, or changes to the entire business model. The archetype or basic model is a blueprint for the redesigned real operating model.
• Focus digitization initiatives on the businesses to which they fit.

The operating model or blueprint is an approach whose impact on the chemical industry’s supply chain management of the future can hardly be overestimated. Research findings suggest that the better diversified chemical companies set up and manage their businesses according to differentiated operating models, the more successful they are at creating value for owners. This approach opens up a third way beyond the existing fragmentation of know-how and resources, but also beyond the schematic centralization attempts of the past.