We surveyed CHEMUK 2025 attendees: the real risks inside UK chemical businesses

The CHEMUK 2025 conference brought together hundreds of operations, compliance and commercial professionals from across the UK chemical sector. Thinc was a headline sponsor – helping attendees learn about how connected data with ERP can drive operational efficiency.

But beyond the technology discussions, we wanted to get a quick pulse-check: what’s keeping ops leaders awake at night? So, we ran an anonymous survey across 80+ chemical and manufacturing sector attendees at the event.

Here’s what the data told us – and why business systems such as ERP (enterprise resource planning) platforms could be the most important lever for change in the sector.

The top concern: rising costs

When asked, “What’s the biggest risk to your business right now?” the majority didn’t choose regulation, innovation, or sustainability.

58% said “rising production costs”.

That’s a striking but unsurprising stat. As we state in our Operational Leader’s Efficiency Playbook (download the playbook), the sector is “being squeezed by its tightest margins in over 20 years”, and “energy prices are sky-high”.

Deloitte’s 2025 Chemical Industry Outlook backs this up: “lower demand, high inventories, and overcapacity of some chemicals” are driving a widespread focus on cost-cutting.

It’s not just about lowering spend – it’s about maintaining viability in an industry where traditional cost-control methods (like labour cuts or squeezing suppliers) offer diminishing returns.

Avoiding sustainability action was much lower down the agenda in terms of risks – it will be interesting to track this in future years as the economic, political and environmental landscape evolves.

Operational complexity is ramping up compliance risk

We also asked: “What’s the hardest part of your job that no system or process seems to solve?”

The top response? Staying ahead of regulatory changes and deadlines (35%).

This outpaced fulfilment performance (23%) and production efficiency (17%). It’s easy to understand why – many attendees visited CHEMUK to learn about compliance updates from the industry’s regulatory bodies.

This result aligns with the evolving burden of UK REACH, CLP, and COMAH compliance. Regulatory updates move fast, yet many businesses still manage traceability across disconnected systems and spreadsheets – making proactive compliance practically impossible.

This question also showed that core ops issues – like on-time, in-full fulfilment and inventory accuracy – remain persistent pain points. These are solvable problems on paper, but they often stem from fractured systems and manual dependencies.

Identifying the root cause of quality issues was also cited to be a challenge by 10% – an inevitable problem without clear audit trails and traceability.

The real priority: control, not costly transformation

We closed the survey with a simple question: “If you could improve one area in your business tomorrow, what would it be?”

Responses clustered around:

• Simplifying compliance and quality control (28%)
• Better production planning (23%)
• Stronger collaboration between departments (23%)

Again, these aren’t calls for shiny dashboards or sweeping transformation. They reflect the core themes we explored in the Operational Leader’s Efficiency Playbook:

• Production planning still relies on spreadsheets or manual tracking in many chemical SMEs — which leads to stockouts, idle time, and waste
• Compliance and QC failures stem from poor traceability, especially when documentation, labelling software, and inventory data’s disconnected
• When departments don’t share a single version of the truth, planning becomes guesswork – which undermines efficiency at every level

McKinsey has noted this sector-wide disconnect too: “The challenge for many players is not access to technology but using it in a way that’s integrated across operations.”

What this all means for the chemical sector

The common thread running through all three survey questions is clear: chemical ops leaders don’t need a revolution. They need reliable visibility to:

• Plan production using accurate, real-time inputs
• Avoid last-minute stockouts and delays
• Cut energy and material waste without compromising output
• Respond to compliance deadlines without panic

And that’s exactly where business technologies such as ERP software fit in.

As our playbook for operations leaders notes, the most digitally mature businesses aren’t just automating — they’re using connected, real-time data to make faster, lower-risk decisions. That includes linking regulatory tasks to production data, automating MRP to avoid overordering materials, and integrating compliance reporting into daily routines.

Explore the practical actions in the playbook

The challenges highlighted in our survey are fixable – but only with connected data. We’ve compiled 30+ efficiency strategies (including for low and mid-digital maturity businesses) in a guide built for ops leaders in the chemical sector.

To explore these, download your copy of The Operational Leader’s Efficiency Playbook.