A winning formula for a sustainable future
Established in 1865 and headquartered in Ludwigshafen, Germany, BASF is the world’s biggest chemical company. Its economic success is intrinsically linked to environmental protection and social responsibility, achieved by “creating chemistry for a sustainable future”.
Its diverse products contribute to the success of 82,000 customers in almost all industrial sectors and help governments and businesses worldwide to address some of society’s most important challenges. In 2022, BASF’s global workforce of more than 110,000 generated revenues approaching €90 billion.
Self-service unlocks savings and efficiencies
Providing consistent, high-quality, and cost-effective services to its highly dispersed workforce, and many supply chain partners, is a key priority for BASF.
It’s a sizeable task; typically, its IT teams receive one million help desk calls every year and manage 125,000 devices, 160,000 email addresses, and 5,000 business applications.
The company has been busy digitizing its service management activities to streamline processes, deliver productive user experiences, and—crucially in today’s challenging economic climate—continually drive down costs and improve competitiveness.
ServiceNow has been supporting BASF’s journey to a single enterprise service platform. In particular, the company wanted to transform the management of its extensive supply chain, featuring more than 80,000 individual suppliers in 60 countries.
This traditionally resource-intensive activity required contributions by thousands of BASF employees, across a complex corporate landscape, comprising around 300 individual business units.
Its decentralized systems, operated at three service hubs on three continents, involved many time-consuming, manual, and repetitive tasks processing large volumes of inquiries on diverse topics and submitted to hundreds of email boxes and via phone calls to agents.
Resolving each inquiry involved many BASF departments, making it impossible for managers to have the visibility to make performance improvements. To achieve its goals, BASF worked with ServiceNow to create a single, streamlined, global supplier management portal, leveraging out-of-the-box automation and self-service functionality.
Nurturing relationships with suppliers and business partners
ServiceNow began by addressing a key challenge at the heart of BASF’s supplier management activities: the need to respond to more than 500,000 inquiries from suppliers every year about the status and payment of invoices. This alone involved 600 BASF employees in its three service hubs.
“This is a small but very important element in our relationship with suppliers, who may also be customers and business partners and who play a vital role for BASF,” explains Rita Lampasona-Hornung, Head of Purchase-to-Pay Finance for EMEA, BASF Global Business Services.
“We were receiving a huge number of emails, some duplicated and some going to the wrong email address. We had no visibility into our speed of response, and there was no consistency in those responses."
“Our suppliers just want to know when they are going to get paid. It was vital that we found an innovative digital solution that provided a high quality, compliant service, while also enabling us to cut costs and be more efficient.”
Identifying the solution required a shift in mindset, according to Johannes Utsch, BASF’s Business Process Expert in Purchase-to-Pay Finance: “With the development of new technologies and platforms, it’s perfectly possible to create a solution that is simple for the user, while also optimizing our own internal processes. Maintaining hundreds of email boxes is not very efficient.”
A template for supplier management
Katalin Velladics, BASF’s Senior Process Expert in Accounts Payable, wanted to create a single, digital platform with as much process automation as possible to handle simple invoicing inquiries.
But Katalin was also looking for a template that could be extended to more supplier management requirements, not just invoicing inquiries. ServiceNow Customer Service Management (CSM) offered all the components she needed in a single solution.
“We fell in love with ServiceNow’s excellent self-service capabilities. We knew this could eliminate many of the questions previously asked by our business partners. Most inquiries about invoices are quite simple to answer and using ServiceNow we could proactively make that information instantly available to suppliers in multiple languages.”
BASF received support from ServiceNow experts from its established implementation partner Accenture, who were already on site assisting the company with other technology projects. Accenture acted as a trusted adviser that helped to assess BASF’s business requirements and translate those for technical colleagues developing the solution.
Launched in April 2022, in an agile, step-by-step approach, the new BASF supplier invoice system, built on ServiceNow Customer Service Management, is rapidly replacing email boxes with one easy-to-use portal. Suppliers use secure log-in protocols to access live tabulated information linked to BASF’s ERP system, displaying every invoice they have submitted to each business unit, its status, and precise payment dates.
These details can be uploaded into suppliers’ own business systems for transparency and cashflow management. ServiceNow CSM provides a growing knowledgebase that gives suppliers answers to simple invoicing questions, such as terms and conditions.
Follow-up questions are raised as tickets, coded to reach the correct recipients. ServiceNow Agent Workspace with AI also brings together a complete supplier history on one screen, enabling agents to efficiently handle inquiries requiring direct contact follow-up with suppliers. Working on a single screen in this way allows agents to resolve inquiries more quickly, on average saving two minutes per case.
Ticket numbers down, resolution speeds up
Previously more than 500,000 invoice-related inquiries were received each year. This has now been reduced to fewer than 200,000, while total tickets raised have been cut by 60% and are now resolved 50% faster. One business partner described the portal as “a great solution to access information independently and an absolute win-win situation for both parties”.
With self-service now transforming the way suppliers engage with Accounts Payable, BASF has seen a 10% efficiency gain in their end-to-end inquiry process, freeing up time for team members to focus on resolving more complex issues for the benefit of all.
“We have worked very closely with suppliers and our internal teams to ensure that we catered for users’ needs as well as BASF’s,” explains Katalin. “They have helped to shape the portal and their feedback has been extremely positive, ensuring continuous improvement.”
ServiceNow Performance Analytics is also playing an important role, helping agents to prioritize cases and evaluate how suppliers are using the portal, identifying opportunities for further refinements. With the aid of performance analytics capabilities, BASF ensures that all inquiries are answered within two working days.
With faster, more precise information and self-service, suppliers are saving time too, while status transparency enables informed decision-making and peace of mind. Next, BASF will use the portal to proactively push news and information to suppliers to further reduce the need for direct contacts.
A revolution for BASF
BASF believes that ServiceNow will provide the sole platform for all communications across its supply chain. Its procurement team has established relationships with suppliers and the plan is to migrate this function onto the ServiceNow platform leveraging Procurement Service Management.
“This is a revolution for BASF,” reflects Johannes. “The application of ServiceNow in this way provides a blueprint for us. We are now seeing the benefits of speed, convenience, and stability, and there will be many more use cases along the way."
“User acceptance of a new solution—by both suppliers and internal teams—is absolutely vital and I was confident that with ServiceNow that’s what we would achieve. Feedback is overwhelmingly positive, and we now have the transparency to control and improve our performance.”