Digital transformation: Wacker Chemie leverages AI to optimize processes.
Wacker Chemie Uncovers Formula for Transforming Sales
Customer-centric approach: Enhanced customer experience through smarter sales.
AI-powered pricing: Streamlined pricing for 3,200+ products globally.
High adoption: 80% of quotes processed via the Conga Platform.
Collaboration success: Unified teams drive innovation and efficiency.
At Wacker Chemie AG, the experiments go well beyond the lab. Learn how the Conga Platform is helping the chemicals manufacturer transform its customer experience and business results.
While you may not know the company name WACKER, you have likely encountered its products. The $5 billion company based in Munich, with operations around the world, provides specialty chemical products that are found in countless applications and everyday items, from cosmetic powders to solar cells to paint colors.
“We are everywhere and nowhere,” says Dirk Ramhorst, who has the dual role of Chief Information Officer and Chief Digital Officer at WACKER. The company’s portfolio includes more than 3,200 products, such as numerous silicone products and polymeric binders, that its customers in virtually every major sector rely on.
Digitalization for us is really a key success factor for the future in many aspects. For us, it’s about wanting to generate value out of what we do. In the last three and a half years, we have been able to prove this value to show a strong track record in a lot of different areas.
One of those areas is learning how to drive continuous value through innovation and efficiency in how WACKER works and operates.
We are a manufacturing company and, therefore, the use of digital technologies is very important for the way we produce, the way we operate, and also the way we invent and develop new technologies or patents. For example, we use AI to make our data-rich processes more intelligent.
Ramhorst likens the process to that of the pharmaceutical industry. “We have, in many cases, more than a thousand elements for one specific step. You can imagine without AI, it can take a while to optimize those processes, even with our very smart engineers. But with the use of AI in supporting those engineers, we can do many optimizations even faster. So, we are able to do those experiments in light speed rather than in weeks or months or years.”
Our digital initiative is about enabling the salesforce to interact with our customers smarter; supporting eCommerce portals, which accounts for almost 50% of our revenue; and exploring digital commerce and new business models
Sieglinde Feist, Senior Vice President of sales and distribution at WACKER, explains further: “As we digitalize our processes, our customers do the same. Along the way, they change their expectations,” she says. “We want to make sure we meet those expectations, whether it’s response time or connectivity or data availability.”
Mastering pricing complexity is key, which can be enormously complex for manufacturers today.
Pricing is not a one-size-fits-all approach. We have to balance a central approach with a regional approach to be competitive in the different markets we serve while addressing our customers with a pricing structure that really captures the value that we bring to them.
To navigate these complexities, WACKER wanted a modern solution that could make it easier for salespeople to work with customers and meet the changing expectations of today’s consumers while driving a consistent approach to pricing that considers all the relevant factors that affect it.
We did a full evaluation of the competitor landscape and chose Conga because it fits best with our needs
The Conga Platform is a unified SaaS platform at the heart of driving transformative selling experiences. Businesses like WACKER rely on it to provide consistently market-driven offers to their buyers across all sales channels.
This tailored experience streamlines purchasing for customers, often resulting in buyers expanding their wallet share with WACKER because the chemical company has made the buying experience so much easier than its competitors’. The Conga Platform removes the complexity and barriers between the sales, pricing, and eCommerce teams that are critical in the buying process, enabling collaboration and ultimately delivering impactful customer experiences that increase adoption, fuel loyalty, and drive higher customer lifetime value.
With the variety and number of products we offer, using Conga is a much more efficient way to approach sales, including making the offer, bringing orders in, using the optimized prices in our systems, and meeting customers’ expectations in a more efficient internal process
Currently, around 80 percent of quotes move through the Conga Platform.
The way we use Conga at this point is very important for us in the pricing and quotation process. Whatever we can learn from other quotes and what’s happening in the market is automatically generated into a better price that we give to our customers. We’re really happy with the high user adoption rate, which means our employees have embraced it.
Data-driven innovation is very important for us. With all the data we have, it’s important that we better understand and leverage that data to generate more value internally and become more innovative, and Conga is helping us do that in our sales process.
Frequently Asked Questions
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What is Wacker Chemie’s digital initiative?
Wacker Chemie’s “WACKER Digital” initiative focuses on leveraging AI and digital tools to optimize manufacturing, sales, and customer experiences.
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How does Wacker Chemie use the Conga Platform?
The Conga Platform simplifies pricing and quoting, enabling Wacker Chemie to deliver market-driven offers and improve sales efficiency.
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What role does AI play in Wacker Chemie’s processes?
AI accelerates data-rich processes, helping engineers optimize manufacturing steps and enabling faster, smarter decision-making.
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How has the Conga Platform improved Wacker Chemie’s sales?
The platform streamlines quoting and pricing, with 80% of quotes processed through Conga, enhancing efficiency and customer satisfaction.
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What challenges did Wacker Chemie address with Conga?
Wacker Chemie tackled pricing complexity, improved response times, and aligned global and regional pricing strategies to meet customer expectations.
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Why is pricing complexity a key focus for Wacker Chemie?
With over 3,200 products, Wacker Chemie needed a solution to balance competitive pricing across diverse markets while capturing value.
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What advice does Wacker Chemie offer for digital transformation?
Collaboration across sales, marketing, and IT teams is essential, along with selecting strategic partners like Conga for long-term success.