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FrontOffice Advantage™ for energy & chemicals 

A powerful catalyst for profitable growth and customer loyalty

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  • Digital transformation
  • Manufacturing
  • Customer experience
  • B2B

 

 

Many energy and chemicals companies today face converging pressures: margin erosion from global oversupply, rising customer expectations their systems can't meet, and new operational complexities that legacy processes can't support. FrontOffice Advantage can help not only relieve those pressures, but rapidly turn them to your advantage. 

 

 

A unified solution for complex challenges

By connecting commercial teams and processes with back-office data and systems, FrontOffice Advantage can help address common yet urgent challenges facing energy and chemicals (E&C) companies today—from slowing growth and inefficient lead-to-cash operations, to disjointed customer experiences and disconnected systems.  

 

Whether you're dealing with one of these challenges or all of them, FrontOffice Advantage can deliver custom solutions that meet you where you are and accelerate you to where you need to be. 

How can we accelerate sales in oversupplied markets?

Global capacity expansion, product commoditization and diminishing demand have amplified price pressures for energy and chemicals (E&C) companies around the globe. Factor in today’s heightened volatility caused by shifting trade policies, and many E&C companies today find themselves struggling to achieve predictable, sustained growth.  

Being the least expensive supplier no longer sets you apart the way it once did. But being the supplier of the most streamlined experiences can.  

FrontOffice Advantage can help you strengthen competitive differentiation and accelerate growth by enabling self-service ordering, proactive technical support, streamlined quoting and other enhancements. As a result, the experiences you deliver can become so valuable, customers will stay loyal and spend more—even when cheaper alternatives exist. 

 

What can help us increase revenue flow while throttling costs?

When systems, processes and teams don't connect, value leakage springs up everywhere. Manual Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) processes can't keep up with dynamic formulas and market-indexed pricing. Disconnected order-to-cash systems slow revenue recognition. Siloed data and systems create delivery delays and order management issues. Too often, these disconnects cause front-office teams to spend time plugging leaks manually, instead of filling the revenue pipeline continuously.  

FrontOffice Advantage helps enhance operational efficiency and accelerate revenue realization by integrating front-, middle- and back-office systems, automating workflows, and providing employees and customers with what they need, when and where they need it.  

As a result, your business can decouple costs from revenues and drive a wedge of profitability into everything you do.  

 

How can we keep up with rising customer expectations?

Your customers increasingly expect friction-free, self-guided experiences—whether that’s configuring chemical formulations themselves, checking orders in real time or accessing technical documentation. Most E&C companies lack the foundation to deliver this.  

As a result, sales and service teams spend time processing fax orders and fielding phone calls, leaving customers too much time to wonder whether it’d be easier to do business with your competitors. 

FrontOffice Advantage smooths the path for customers by connecting customer and business data, personalizing experiences, and fostering consistency across sales, commerce and service channels. That way, you can meet customer expectations at every touchpoint, in ways your competitors can’t easily touch. 

 

How can we modernize rapidly without risking disruption?

Many E&C companies delay transformation due to fears of long-term disruption or difficulty building a clear, trustworthy value case. But the longer you wait, the more you widen the gap between the capabilities of your business and the realities and expectations of today’s markets and customers.  

FrontOffice Advantage combines industry-specific assets and accelerators with Deloitte Digital’s extensive experience in technology integration, operating model design and change management to help streamline operations while also preserving business continuity.  

It can even help make the case for transformation. Among companies that include FrontOffice Advantage as part of their ERP modernizations, we’ve seen incremental investments as low as 25% produce upwards of 60% in additional value—all in a matter of months, not years. 

 

 

 

Open a pipeline to profitability


FrontOffice Advantage isn't just about fixing what's broken. It's about capturing value you didn't know you were losing, creating competitive advantages that can't be easily copied, and building commercial operations that scale with your business. 

 

 

Streamline customer experiences

Your customers want easier, more personalized ways of business. With FrontOffice Advantage, you can give customers the options they need and the convenience they seek, from self-service compound identification through automated order tracking and invoice processing.  

Integrate front-office operations

Siloed teams, technologies and processes leak value. FrontOffice Advantage leverages our strengths in operating model design and AI enablement to help synthesize new connections, automate inefficient processes, and accelerate lead-to-cash flow. 

Accelerate growth and efficiency

Revenue growth needn’t spark rising costs. FrontOffice Advantage can give commercial teams the fuel they need to accelerate revenue growth, while giving back-office teams new levers to monitor, measure and throttle down costs across the value chain.  

 

 

Connected solutions for resilient value  

 

 

01

B2B omnichannel commerce

FrontOffice Advantage helps transform manual, offline ordering into a frictionless self-service digital experience for specialty chemicals, industrial gases, petrochemicals and energy products. 

 

  • Provide a self-service portal for product grade selection, custom formulation configuration, bulk and packaged ordering, order placement and tracking, and technical documentation 
  • Offer a consistent experience across both legacy (phone, email, EDI) and modern (web, mobile, distributor portals) digital channels 
  • Connect front-end commerce processes and experiences with back-end planning, batching, scheduling and logistics systems for timely delivery updates, efficient slot management and streamlined order-to-cash processes

02

Modern sales strategies

FrontOffice Advantage helps sales teams drive growth by providing a complete, data-driven customer view that powers intelligent account planning and more efficient sales flows. 

 

  • Increase margins with application-based offer segmentation, volume-tier and market-indexed pricing strategy, and technical-grade differentiation
  • Equip reps with AI-guided sales tools that enable more informed customer interactions and provide the intelligence to deliver custom account plans
  • Offer customers valuable insights into chemical applications, formulation optimization, regulatory changes and safe handling procedures
  • Streamline configuration of commercial offers tailored to customer needs for complex products, blends and formulations

03

Revenue operations excellence

 

With FrontOffice Advantage, E&C companies can optimize pricing, contracts and quote-to-cash processes, capturing full margin potential from revenue operations across commodity and specialty portfolios.  

 

  • Manage systematic enforcement of complex contracts to minimize value leakage over multiyear lifecycles 
  • Replace manual Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) processes with streamlined, automated workflows that handle cost-plus formulas, index benchmarks and volume-based discounting 
  • Connect upstream demand signals with downstream supply chain execution for more efficient sales and operations planning, and speed revenue recognition for bulk shipments, drummed products and consignment inventory 

04

Service that sustains loyalty

FrontOffice Advantage dramatically reduces manual order and data cleanup, freeing customer service reps to focus on relationship building and proactive product support.  

 

  • Deliver high-touch experience for new product creation and meet service-level agreements (SLAs) while controlling cost to serve for both high-volume commodity accounts and specialty product customers 
  • Increase first-call resolution by providing field service teams with unified access to complete customer formulation history, product usage, incidents and service contracts 
  • Streamline logistics for more reliable deliveries, smoother end-to-end customer experiences and a lower cost of supplier

“As market pressures and customer expectations intensify in the global energy and chemicals industry, connected commercial operations can fuel a new era of growth, efficiency and customer loyalty.”

Todd Goldenberg

Energy & Chemicals Practice Leader, Deloitte Consulting LLP

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