Innovation Engine: Dow Corning Invests In Change

Dow Corning Corp.'s enterprise-resource-planning system, now 9 years old, supports the company's vital supply-chain, human-resources, and financials processes and still serves as the foundation for innovative new business processes. "Any of our general business managers will tell you that SAP is a pivotal part of Dow Corning today," says Abbe Mulders, executive VP and CIO of the $3.4 billion-a-year chemicals company.

Last year the ERP software was central in two major projects to let customers place orders on the Web. Mulders and her team first built an online site to sell the Xiameter brands, which is a collection of products sold in bulk, including silicone fluids and rubbers. "Because we had SAP, we were able to put up the Web site and launch order-entry capability in less than seven months," Mulders says.

The IT team then re-created the model for its Dow Corning brands, a more complex group of products that meet specific needs of customers ranging from small specialty shops to billion-dollar corporations. "To build a Web site and order capability that bridges across that vast span of a customer base was quite a feat. SAP was the backbone that allowed us to do that," Mulders says.

The 300-person IT team focuses most of its ERP-related time and dollars on new development, not maintenance. "We support that innovation and changing business needs with 60% to 65% of our resources toward new projects," Mulders says.

The company began implementing the ERP software in 1996. Two years and about $100 million later, it finished the bulk of the implementation. The following year, Dow Corning added SAP's human-resources-management software. Since then, it has upgraded the system--a single instance housed in Dow Corning's Midland, Mich., headquarters--about five times. The customer database is "in the terabytes" now, Mulders says, and at peak times some 1,500 users simultaneously access the various applications from around the world.

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