Midland, MI June 11, 2001 The Dow Chemical Co. announced today that it has officially established ERP (enterprise resource planning)-to-ERP connectivity via Elemica, a neutral network founded by leading chemical companies to serve the global chemicals industry. The announcement means that Dow recently completed its first buy-side and sell-side order transactions through the e-marketplace, by selling glycerine to BASF and purchasing soda ash from Solvay Minerals.
"At Dow, we are aggressively building our e-business integration capabilities to better address customer needs and capture value from supply chain efficiencies," said Andrew Liveris, Dow business group president for Performance Chemicals and co-chairman of the Elemica board of directors. "We recognize the value that Elemica delivers through reduced transactional costs and streamlined business processes both on the buy-side and the sell-side of our business and have aggressive goals in both areas."
From a global purchasing perspective, Solvay is the first of many suppliers that Dow will be conducting transactions with through Elemica as Dow intends to move a majority of its strategic procurement of chemical raw materials through the e-marketplace within the next 18 months. According to Pierre Winant, director of e-business at Solvay, "Dow's commitment to ERP connectivity was clear from the beginning and their implementation was impressive. From our perspective, we recognize the industry is changing and are pleased to be on the leading edge of that change."
"Working with Dow to establish ERP-to-ERP connectivity through Elemica is a significant achievement for our company," said Wayne Hill, senior vice president, BASF. "As one of the initial companies to establish a Web-enabled ERP-to-ERP connection through Elemica, we are another step closer to realizing the full benefits of e-business."
Chem eStandards is the Extensible Markup Language (XML) standard of choice for Dow. Lead by the Chemical Industry Data Exchange, Chem eStandards is an initiative dedicated to the development and promotion of nonproprietary XML-based standards to facilitate B2B data exchange across the global chemical industry. Dow launched, MyAccount@Dow, in 1999 and currently has more than 5,000 registered users globally. In addition, Dow is participating in electronic data interchange and telemetry activity with more than 200 strategic customers.
