The European e-Business Report 2004 - Berlecon Research GmbH

The European E-Business Report 2004Activity 1: The portals – communities of users of chemical products:SpecialChem is a gateway to several portals on the Internet which offer (for free) avariety of information and support functions for users of chemical products. The usercommunity currently comprises 80,000 registered firms and individuals ("members"),with about 3,000 new registrations per month.Activity 2: Carrying out e-marketing and sales promotion for clients: From thisactivity, SpecialChem earns its income by organising targeted e-marketing andpromotion activities for clients. This activity exploits the database of product usersand the profound knowledge about these users collected via the various portals.Results• The use of ICT for marketing and sales purposes is still remarkably underdevelopedin the chemical industries, according to SpecialChem's experience.The company says that there are still many companies which do not even knowthe e-mail addresses of their customers, or at least have not organised them ina way that they could be used even for simple direct mailings.• SpecialChem expects that the e-business focus in the chemical industries willshift from cost cutting and optimising supply processes to marketing. A lot ofplayers, the large ones in particular, have already optimised their supply sideprocesses in highly sophisticated ways or are in the process of doing so. Oncethis has been accomplished, they may search for better ways to market newproducts and to extend their markets.BASF (GERMANY)BackgroundActivitiesBASF is one of the world's leading chemical companies, headquartered in Ludwigshafen,Germany, with production sites in 41 countries and customers in more than170 countries worldwide. In response to growing pressures on its commoditiesbusiness, BASF turned to modern e-business solutions to contain costs. It hassuccessfully implemented a customer focused supply chain integration initiativeusing Internet and extranet hub portals conforming to the leading industry eChemStandards TM .BASF has actively engaged in standards development and implementation forchemical e-business since the mid 1980s. Initially the focus was mainly on EDI andtailored one-to-one solutions. During 2000-2001, together with a small number ofleading chemical companies and partners, BASF were instrumental in developingthe first version of Chem eStandards TM . Since then BASF and its partners continueto encourage the adoption and use of Chem XML through a partnership process forstandardization and simplification.BASF conduct their e-business activities mainly via its own portal WorldAccount, anintegrated global extranet platform for customers, and through the Elemica network.By the end of 2001 WorldAccount had seamlessly integrated the existing regionalBASF industry portals for different product categories. BASF's ERP is linked toElemica, a neutral e-marketplace acting as a transaction hub for the purchase andsale of basic, intermediate, specialty and fine chemicals. BASF uses the ElemicaBuyer Direct and the Elemica Seller Direct solution as a “lite” working channel tosmall and medium sized companies.Vendor managed inventory is the main instrument for building up an integratedsupply chain network. BASF has just launched its VMI (Vendor ManagementInventory) solution which makes full use of the Chem eStandardsTM data structureand processes.95