FEATURE

By Jesús E. Ibarra R. and Jessica N. Santiago, Dynasol Group

ASI surveys industry leaders to learn how the ever-evolving digital revolution is impacting the adhesive and sealant industry and what to expect in the future.

Digitalization is transforming the chemical industry by driving efficiency, innovation, and sustainability across all aspects of production and operations. The integration of advanced technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), big data analytics, and automation is enabling companies to optimize processes, enhance product quality, and reduce costs. Digital tools are facilitating real-time monitoring and predictive maintenance, improving supply chain management, and accelerating the development of new materials and chemicals. As the industry faces increasing demand for sustainability and regulatory compliance, digitalization plays a crucial role in enabling more precise resource management. Digitalization is helping to reshape the future of the chemical industry, allowing for more adaptability and competitiveness in an increasingly complicated world.

ASI asked representatives from companies involved in digitalization within the chemical industry to explain the benefits digital technologies offer adhesive and sealant manufacturers and what they think we can expect in the future. We surveyed Hilan Kaplan, PhD, Director of Technical Sales at Knowde, Gregory J. Mulholland, CEO at Citrine Informatics, and a representative from Uncountable to share their insights.

ASI: What are the main benefits to adhesive and sealant manufacturers of integrating digital technology into their processes?

Gregory J. Mulholland, CEO at Citrine Informatics: Agility and innovation. AI-driven experimentation has been shown to reduce the number of experiments needed to hit target properties by 50-80%. You can use that speed to get to market quicker, or respond to a customer quicker and gain more market share. You can also decide to use that extra capacity to explore more options and be more innovative and therefore sell products with higher margins.

Uncountable: Knowledge retention, better internal collaboration and quicker time to market are all benefits of introducing digital technology. Software platforms should assist in ensuring that no experiments done in a lab are forgotten — they should live in a place where they are accessible by other members of the R&D team. This allows team members to get up to speed quicker and to learn from each other's work. All of this is in service of long-term company goals, be that turning a three-week, quick-turn project into something that takes one afternoon by better utilizing an experiment done before or turning a two-year, long-term research goal into a six-month process through the use of AI.

Hilan Kaplan, PhD, Director of Technical Sales at Knowde: Integrating digital technology, specifically harnessing the power of data, can play a major role in achieving many of the business goals adhesives and sealant companies are focusing on today. From driving sales growth to lowering raw material costs, it can all be accomplished by leveraging technology powered by rich, clean data.

ASI: What role does data analytics play in the development of new adhesive and sealant products?

Mulholland: It helps formulators spot trends and relationships between raw materials and processing parameters and final product properties. Transparent AI systems expose the "thinking" of the AI to the product experts, uncovering complex relationships and helping the expert gain more knowledge about their product area.

Uncountable: Data analytics can help scientists understand where they should be spending their time — allowing researchers to quickly visualize tradeoffs and understand what has been tried before. Techniques like machine learning and artificial intelligence can provide novel experiments to try in a lab and allow scientists to try much more innovative experiments — while a human can usually only visualize two or three variables, the software system will balance hundreds.

Kaplan: Data analytics can be very valuable when developing new adhesive and sealant products, specifically for portfolio management and knowing what products to develop (or not). By combining sales data, market trends, and technical information about existing products, business intelligence tools can help guide development as well as portfolio management and optimization.

ASI: What are the key challenges faced when implementing digital technology in raw materials sourcing, manufacturing or distribution, and how are they being addressed?

Mulholland: There are three key challenges: data, people, and skills.

Historically, data has been saved in notebooks or spreadsheets that were only used by the researcher that did the experiment. Understandably, they didn’t record all the conditions of the experiment because they knew what they were. So, a lot of historical data is not as useful as you would think. Citrine’s AI has been developed to work on very small datasets to overcome this challenge.

People don’t like change. So as with any business process change, there will be early adopters and those that fight it. Making sure that you have a team and a technology provider that understand change management is key.

In the past, AI was the domain of coding geeks. Now, user-friendly interfaces enable you to scale the use of AI without hiring a bunch of data scientists. The best AI platforms are designed for adhesives experts to use.

Uncountable: Change Management is the biggest — scientists today often record their work in paper or spreadsheets and moving them off of these technologies to something modern and ensuring that your different users use a platform in the same way is often difficult. We encourage seeing how platforms perform with your data in them, perhaps with hands-on usage, and talking through what a training and configuration program would look like.

Kaplan: The key challenge most companies face today is they want to leverage sophisticated tools or even explore the possibilities of AI, but the quality and cleanliness of their raw material master data makes this nearly impossible. It is absolutely critical to have clean, complete, and normalized data before going into any significant digital transformation project, so companies have to either 1) dedicate significant time and resources to a master data initiative or 2) work with a provider like Knowde to do this for them.

ASI: How do you think emerging technologies like AI and IoT will shape the future of this industry, and what steps should companies take to stay ahead of these emerging technologies?

Mulholland: I would argue that these technologies are no longer emerging. They have emerged and are being actively used by world-leading adhesive developers. They will enable faster development cycles and less resource-intensive innovation. Any companies not yet using AI in R&D should start looking for a provider now. Otherwise, they will find it hard to compete with rivals that do.

Uncountable: AI and IOT will be important in helping teams innovate faster. As the complexity of the R&D space grows, it will be more difficult for single scientists to keep all of the information in their head. AI will augment the scientist, giving them a digital assistant they can lean on for critical insights. IOT will help fuel AI advancements by providing more data sources that AI systems can use from. Companies should focus on creating the right infrastructure to take advantage of these technologies. AI is reliant on large sets of well-structured data to do well. Expecting AI to work off of Excel or messy PDFs is likely to not end well. Instead, focus on making sure data you gather moving forward is clean, so you will be able to take advantage of any new advancements in technology.

Kaplan: AI and IoT will be major unlocks to efficiency and optimization of all things including product development, sales enablement, and even raw material sourcing and strategy. Like most things, the output will only be as good as the inputs allow, so to stay ahead of these technologies, it is best to make sure you have your IT systems, raw materials, and product information organized, clean, and ready to be fully utilized.

ASI: What future trends do you foresee in the use of digital technology within the adhesives and sealants industry?

Mulholland: I firmly believe that the industry is moving in the direction of more customization and tailoring. While there is always the possibility that we find a one-size-fits-all molecule or additive or component that will revolutionize adhesives and sealants, I think that is extremely unlikely. And if we do, there is a big risk that it has unintended side effects like PFAS and PFOA did. To get to ever-higher levels of performance, we need to specifically design on an application-by-application basis. Digitization will enable this to happen at scale. Humans simply cannot process and optimize and find trends fast enough without computers. You can think about this as what happened in finance. Paper became spreadsheets, but ultimately, we created high-frequency trading and much more advanced technical analysis. We are in the process now of gen 2 digitization: creating value from the data you have. But what is coming is a totally new paradigm where scientists are orchestrators, conductors of breakthroughs and new products rather than a sole virtuosic performer.

Uncountable: Large Language Models will allow for direct voice navigation with platforms — scientists will be able to use digital technology hands free in any lab setting. We will continue to see tighter coupling of AI throughout the project process — imagine an AI helping to design experiments, adjust from customer feedback, and summarize reports of what was done for management overview. All of this will make scientists more powerful and help them continue to innovate quickly for their customers.

Kaplan: Technology is going to accelerate mergers & acquisitions and shorten the time-to-value from synergies in portfolios. Technology is going to shorten R&D cycles and influence portfolio rationalization making for leaner but equally if not more performant product lines. Technology is going to help reduce the dependence (and loss) of tribal knowledge. Technology is going to help sellers access information faster than ever before and be able to serve customers with less dependence on technical experts. Technology is going to lower the cost to serve customers by giving them the ability to self-serve data, documents, and solutions. The list goes on and on!