BASF has reached the most important point in one of the company's largest IT projects: The three SAP applications for Logistics, Financial Accounting and Plant Maintenance at the Ludwigshafen location have been successfully integrated on a single standardized platform. Approximately 13,000 employees now work on a daily basis with the new system Cobalt (Consolidated BASF Accounting, Logistic and Technic System), which administers a five terabyte data inventory. By consolidating the SAP systems BASF is reducing its annual IT operating costs by an amount in the double-digit million range.

The SAP consolidation project entitled PACE (Process and Application Consolidation Enterprise Systems BASF Group) was initiated by IT Governance at BASF approximately three years ago. The project size is as yet unprecedented anywhere in the world. In Europe the project is being realized by BASF IT Services, which operates the SAP systems as IT service provider and is responsible for support in day-to-day operations.

The PACE project results in faster and more cost-efficient business processes, data comparable on a worldwide basis and establishes a uniform SAP standard: "The new platform constitutes one of the most modern IT landscapes in the world. The new IT structure can be flexibly adapted to organizational changes within the company. This will make it possible to master the business challenges of the upcoming years even more efficiently", says Andrew Pike, head of Information Services BASF Group.

In the past the continuing development of the individual SAP systems at BASF had led to a heterogeneous IT landscape with a large number of internal and external interfaces. A completely integrated process chain has been created by removing these interfaces.

In a first step, by the end of 2005 BASF IT Services established a shared platform for the accounting and maintenance systems at the BASF Ludwigshafen location. At the same time, the IT service provider brought more than 4,000 previous individual system customizations up to the current SAP R/3 Enterprise standard. By April 2006 all the operative systems of the BASF Group had been migrated to the Unicode standard. This made it possible for all the written languages of the world to be represented in a single system, a basic prerequisite for the worldwide uniform representation of business processes. By the beginning of 2008 all the individual workflows were consolidated in the new, integrated system. This process was accompanied by intensive testing.

The largest challenge during the last three years was the permanent availability of the applications. "The 13,000 users in Europe hardly noticed the migration activities, since BASF IT Services made sure that the system was always available in spite of all the work being done," points out Dr. Ralf Sonnberger, Managing Director of BASF IT Services. "We oriented our support organization to the new Cobalt application at an early stage and our team was already providing active support for the project during the various test phases. As a result we know the new processes very well and can guarantee a consistently high level of support quality in the future."

The PACE project is not over with the migration of the three applications. A subsequent project will follow immediately in which the SAP applications at the BASF locations Antwerp and Schwarzheide will be migrated to the Cobalt system as well.