BASF: Driving Innovation Through Strategic Business Alignment

BASF: Driving innovation through strategic business alignment

For the world’s largest chemical company, innovation has been a guiding principle for more than 150 years. With more than 100,000 employees worldwide, BASF is a market and research leader in the chemical industry.

Having a strategic approach to new product innovation is always an essential component for growth. To achieve its goals, BASF needed to control the innovation chain, automate its processes and align product initiatives with portfolio management. Greater transparency would allow its global innovation practitioners to track and manage innovation work and progress toward goals and milestones.

The needs

Digital support for management of R&D projects
Comprehensive, company-wide overview of R&D activities
Steering of innovation on a portfolio level

The challenges

Limited transparency and communication between business units
Tying complex, enterprise-wide processes together
Standardized, yet flexible approach to cover a broad range of innovation activities

How Sopheon helped

Sopheon began working with BASF in 2003 to launch Sopheon's Accolade software as a means to improve the company’s innovation tools and processes. Global governance and process standardization within central R&D was the first priority, followed by advanced reporting capabilities to give all decision-makers a clear path to innovation decisions.

Today, Accolade is being used to track and manage roughly 3,000 research and development activities throughout the world, streamlining new product decision-making and integrating innovation data throughout the business ecosystem, including R&D, sales, finance and operations. The company has more than 4,000 users in roughly 100 global sites using Accolade.

Working together with BASF, Sopheon helped design and implement:

Transparent decision-making and status details, creating visibility at the leadership level
More rapid innovation project assessment and go/no-go decisioning
A common language and metrics for teams around the world

What our customers say

“At BASF, Accolade enables data-based steering of individual R&D projects as well as whole innovation portfolios. Due to the long-term partnership with Sopheon, our evolving requirements are continuously implemented in the software.”

Michael Bretz

Head of Innovation Management & Strategic Controlling, BASF SE

BASF