Huntsman

Helping Huntsman hit its targets

Huntsman is a manufacturer and marketer of chemicals for a variety of global industries including automotives, aviation, construction, health care, footwear, paints and coatings, textiles and personal care.

Today the company has 14,000 employees and over 75 operations in 24 countries, with revenues of over $13 billion.

In 2006, Huntsman acquired the global Textile Effects business from Ciba Specialty Chemicals, Inc. This business already had 4,300 employees at 68 sites across 43 countries. The business application landscape comprised 68 BPCS (ERP) instances, and more than 200 windows-based business applications.

Huntsman asked IBM Global Business Services to help it achieve two goals: 1) the integration of its new Textile Effects business into its existing operations, and 2) the standardization and simplification of its business processes and IT applications on a global scale through the implementation of SAP.

IBM proposed an outsourcing solution to manage the business applications and part of the IT infrastructure. We leveraged IBM's global delivery infrastructure and transferred the necessary knowledge to our global delivery teams in India, Brazil and South Africa.

Huntsman also needed an SAP implementation partner. They selected IBM Global Business Services. IBM Global Business Services consultants will assist Huntsman with the roll-out of this SAP solution across Asia, Europe and the Americas, with clustered country implementations.

Teams involved in the delivery of the application outsourcing services included project managers, IT process specialists, ERP specialists, Microsoft application specialists and iSeries system engineers.

For the realization and roll-out of the SAP solution, IBM composed international teams made up of SAP project managers, SAP business consultants and SAP XI specialists. They all needed to have a minimum of four years' experience in the area of finance, logistics, manufacturing or sales, as well as the leadership skills necessary to lead such a complex change project.

Besides having a strong knowledge of their area of expertise and a minimum of 10 years of IT and change management experience, these consultants had one characteristic in common: the perseverance to prove themselves successful in a complex multicultural environment.