NEXT 26 – Winning Ways in Action: Building a Scalable WXP Foundation to Focus, Accelerate, Transform & Win at BASF
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A look inside BASF's global digital transformation with Norman Schimkowiak, Global Head of Enterprise Website Solutions. Learn how the world’s largest chemical company established a highly scalable Web Experience Platform (WXP) foundation using Magnolia DXP to eliminate fragmentation, increase agility, and drive sustainable growth and innovation.
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Thank you for the introduction. Already a nice management summary, so the most important things already said, but let me nevertheless walk you through the slides. Before we jump into the details, let me just say a few words about BASF in general. Biggest chemical company in the world, more or less in every country we're serving products in the world. In every industry, we've anchored with big plans and locations, which calls Verbund, because we have a clear value chain, and this is distributed to the whole world, which is then also infecting us as the team who drives the web marketing strategies of BASF. But BASF has a strong business model, and I have to explain just, no worries, just high level. So our purpose is we create chemistry for a sustainable future. And we're doing this in nearly every industry. And we've separated the industries into segments, and they are the core segments, like chemicals, materials, and they're a standalone business, like agriculture solutions and surface technologies. And we are based or driven by our values, which are the core values. You can read all the stuff if you want to in a page. I will skip it. But one important part is the, on the right-hand side, is strategic levers. Because in 2024, we introduced our new winning ways strategy, which is based on those strategic levers. Focus, accelerate, transform, and win. And you will learn why does this influence our project and the platform in a few seconds. But what is our web experience platform, WXP, about at a glance? So we went live in August 2024, only after nine months. And this wouldn't be never happened if the mentioned collaboration would not be there. And I also, some kudos to the colleagues from Kodit, because they are one of our implementation partners. They did a great job, and doing a great job, and committed, and really skilled people, I have to admit. And our platform is quite huge, because we're the biggest chemical company. So we have a lot of author, or a big author community, around 700 authors. We are in more than 86 languages offering our content. We have a big reusable component library. If you ask our authors, still not enough. But I think we are really good with that. And, yeah, we have a kind of governed, headless platform, which is fully integrated into BASF landscape, with having sales force, commerce tools, and all the things, as Cornerstone said. So still integrates seamlessly into our architecture. But what is the purpose, value, capabilities, and strategic role of our platform? So, Zorina already touched it. In the past, we had fragmented solutions, also external hosted solutions. And with introducing WXP, we had the chance to move and migrate those external solutions into one consistent platform, which was the first step. The second step in a few seconds. And also, we've created a huge component library, which serves, from our perspective and also from authoring perspective, every need, and which helps us to have a really short time to market. Within minutes, you can create a web page and build up your content. And we will also see in a few seconds, with the help of this modular capabilities and integration, like AI for authors, but also AI for our customers and visitors on the page, will really help for the AI, or with the AI for authors, to speed up the content creation chain. Because they can't have, and this is our vision with 6.4 and after, to really have the AI-supported, or supporting tools at the place where the author need it. Not just have a separate box or something like this. No, it's at the time, at the moment, where the author or the people need this. It's there to create pictures, content, or what else. And on the end, Jan already explained today, SEO, or even one step further, GEO or AI SEO, is a big, important topic for us. Still, web pages, especially from big corporate companies, are still valid in the future as the source of truth. But nevertheless, we also have to make our content consumable for AI machines and things like this. Winning ways in action, I've already mentioned, or winning ways, strategic levers, which is focus, accelerate, transform, and win. And I try to align a few things on that. So, for example, standardized portfolio on global platforms. So, as I mentioned in the past, we had lots of platforms available. Everybody is doing their own stuff, especially in the regions. But with this, we've introduced not only the platform, but also a governance approach. So, currently, we really condense all the platforms and helping then also our businesses to optimize the customer journeys. To have a, you not scattered customer journeys. Not, you search a product and jump to the web shop and have to search again because there's no handshake between the platforms and things like this. But on the other hand side, we also have cornerstones we have to consider. Like, as I mentioned, Salesforce as our CRM system or also other solutions available. But if you look at the Accelerate topic, what we really identified is on the one hand side, introducing an AI enablement program. So, every corporate, everybody is talking about AI. But we've decided to do it differently, maybe to the one or the other. We've decided to really combine it with business value. So, only if there's a certain business value available and there is a clear governance also in AI available to make sure that we are not doing thousands of things and everybody is doing the same. We're really focusing on those things which have the highest business value because, as you might recognize, the chemical industry, especially in Germany, is much under pressure. And that's why we have to really focus on the most valuable things and really looking at the things which drives the most value. And in the transform area, we see a transformation for our users and for the business or our internal business partner. For the users, it's we offering a self-service portal because it reduces our cost in the customer shared service centers. Because if a customer can download by their own the documents, can have the download history, can get notifications if a document like a safety data sheet or transactional technical data sheet is outdated, then get a message. Then they do not have to ping a mail or call somebody, which reduces costs because we are cost-driven and this is really important. And one thing which also goes really is the portal consolidation because portal consolidation means in the past we also on our standard platform provides portals and web shops for every customer group. But now we've decided to condense this. We only have bsf.com as the web pages for information and our MyBSF Word, which is the web shop. That's it. Everything else will be shut down. Everything else will be migrated. The customer will be migrated to those standard solutions. But there is not a one-to-one feature migration, we also have to say. We also will in the future maybe missing the one or the other feature, but maybe also get another feature which is maybe more important. And the last topic is the win. So as I mentioned, AI is important for the author community because we want to grant them the necessary tools at the point where they are. And we've decided also to have a dedicated infrastructure for China. So if you remember the chart with the footprint of BASF, you see in every county there's a big plant and it's called local for local. And here we do the same China for China. And that's why we've decided to also create an infrastructure dedicated for China. And we close to manage it together with the intensive collaboration with Magnolia. So a few steps missing to make it more stable. And the first use case is also up and there and want to go live. Next slide. And this is the end of the presentation. So basically what I've mentioned, with the integrated state-of-the-art platform, we have a more flexible and faster time to market. We then conducted or we're still doing it. The portal consultation, you could imagine it's a huge discussion also with the business to convince them to migrate to a standard and shut down your own baby, so to say. But we're on a good track and sometimes difficult situations are good for standard solutions. This is the good thing besides all the other bad things. But what are the next steps? So currently we are in the complete, the current platform upgrade. We want to also leverage the full potential of Magnolia by switching to 6.4. We have a little track to go. But I think this is also important and we will manage it. And then we really, which is something we've promised to the business users, to have this embedded analytics. Because currently we have Piano externally. We want to embed analytics. So if you open and maintain the page and see you have four visitors the last 30 days, maybe you can get rid of the page or something like this. But you guys mentioned it. So Figma to component, it's also going in this direction to leverage the possibilities to really, okay, creating a design draft and make it a fully working component based on our library and the back end. And one important thing which is also highly appreciated or highly requested, I would say, by the business is the hyper-personalization. This is something we also will tackle in the future and we'll focus on. And AI I already mentioned. And then there's a little bit space in between because you learned today about the new SaaS solution and what is coming. So we are looking at, really interested and curious about the possibilities because we have a past solution in place. But we want to, in the midterm future, migrate to SaaS to also leverage more cost-effective and to be here more leaner to drive the needs of BASF. Yeah. That's it from my perspective. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.