Challenge

The diverse nature of BASF’s various business units, which target multiple industries, markets, and customer personas, combined with a complex product portfolio that must consider legal and customer-specific aspects, resulted in the emergence of numerous customer-facing digital solutions. This led to a fragmented commerce landscape that required a wide range of niche skills for development and a high total cost of ownership.

To address these challenges, BASF envisioned a future commerce architecture where their central digital service unit could effectively manage the different requirements from both business units and customers. The goal was to offer a seamless customer experience by providing consistent information and service across all digital and physical touchpoints, integrating with BASF's system landscape, including ERP and master data systems, Product Information Management solutions, and the CRM environment.

In 2020, they embarked on the Digital Commerce Platform (DCP) journey at BASF, encountering multiple technologies and complex operational models. They supported and enhanced various solutions, including monolithic enterprise commerce suits, Shop-as-a-Service solutions, and custom webshop solutions developed by individual business units. Additionally, they recognized the growing expectations of customers for a B2C-like experience in business transactions and aimed to position BASF to capitalize on the increasing trend of online transactions in the B2B sector.

The project successfully addressed the complex nature of BASF’s businesses, streamlined operational models, enhanced the customer experience, and allowed BASF to stay ahead of its competition. It exemplifies the possibilities and benefits of adopting MACH technologies and a best-of-breed approach, setting a benchmark for large-scale digital transformations in the B2B sector.

By showcasing the project, BASF aims to demonstrate to other large B2B organizations that they can overcome similar challenges and successfully implement similar transformations by adopting a best-of-breed approach. They have almost completed the solution, with final rollouts underway to onboard more than 16,000 customers globally by the end of 2024, proving the feasibility of their approach on a large scale.

Strategy

BASF successfully orchestrated this transformation by leveraging a robust partner network, technical expertise, and a strong emphasis on people and change management activities, all underpinned by an unwavering commitment to customer satisfaction.

Without initially knowing about MACH, they designed the target architecture to enable business units to launch customer portals more easily and quickly. By decoupling the frontend and backend, implementing reusable services for maximum flexibility, and seamlessly integrating into BASF’s backend landscape while supporting different customer journeys, the team convinced stakeholders to invest in the initiative. This marked the beginning of the MACH era at BASF, aligning perfectly with the vision of creating industry-leading shopping experiences.

To govern this transformation, they established a "Design Board," a decision-making body with representatives from all business units globally, supporting feature prioritization to ensure a strong focus on business value and empowering the business units.

Just six months after the start of the implementation, they launched new shops, proving the feasibility of the architecture at an early stage and collecting customer feedback rapidly. After two years, microservices had been embedded in more than 10 different customer portals at BASF. A crucial factor for the adoption of the platform by business units was the consistent focus on composability. Instead of providing one global eCommerce solution, the team created a set of reusable services enabling business units to compose their digital offerings for customers.

The migration of BASF's largest customer portal, “WorldAccount,” to the new MACH-based “myBASFWorld” is ongoing and will be completed by the end of 2024.

With the new platform, they have significantly improved the customer experience by enhancing non-functional KPIs like performance and response times. This was achieved by adhering to modern architecture principles, adopting cloud technology, and reducing dependencies on other solutions where possible, such as through decoupling via event-driven architecture approaches.

In parallel, a dedicated change management, communication, and learning workstream was set up to drive the project to success from a people perspective, as more than 1,500 BASF employees and over 16,000 customers are impacted by this change. The team aims to increase the usage of the solutions by 25%.

Method

A major goal of the initiative was to offer high flexibility for BASF's business units while maintaining a manageable and efficient technology landscape. Many business units offer portals or digital tools to customers, specific to different target industries, markets, or customer personas. While offering specific user interfaces, many of these solutions also required shared capabilities (e.g., product information, literature downloads, cart and checkout, etc.). This led to the decision to move towards a headless architecture, enabling differentiated frontends while reusing shared backend services.

To achieve the required flexibility for business units, they implemented microservices that encapsulate business capabilities to be exposed to customer-facing frontends. Some services include extensive business logic, while others act as proxies to existing processes and functions in BASF's backend systems.

They built all services using API-first principles and published API specifications in BASF’s internal developer portal for easy discovery and usage by other development teams. In addition to using dedicated MACH solutions like commercetools and Contentful, the team integrated many of the more monolithic backend systems, driving the publication of APIs from those systems (including ERP, CRM, etc.). To avoid too many operational dependencies, event-driven integration was enabled wherever asynchronous communication between systems and services was feasible.

To support non-functional requirements for the overall platform and customer-facing frontends, a modern, cloud-based environment was implemented on AWS. Custom-developed services were deployed into a managed Kubernetes environment, enabling capabilities like auto-scaling. They also leveraged managed cloud services (e.g., databases, API gateways, etc.) and serverless components (e.g., AWS Lambda functions) for specific use cases.

Adopting the MACH approach not only provided more flexibility for business units and a better experience for customers but also increased overall collaboration between the involved teams in BASF's IT delivery organization. As the next step, they plan to further decompose frontends to leverage frontend components in various customer portals and further reduce the total cost of operation.