Digital Transformation for BYK

The speciality chemicals and measuring instruments manufacturer BYK Additives & Instruments decided back in 2014 to review its digital strategy in the area of marketing and sales. The company's external image had become outdated and BYK also wanted to move from a traditional to a modern, digital provider.

BYK is part of the ALTANA Group and consists of two companies: BYK-Chemie supplies chemical additives for paints, plastics, printing inks and adhesives as well as for the oil and gas industry. BYK-Gardner manufactures measuring instruments for the quality control of colour, gloss and physical material properties.

The speciality chemicals and measuring instruments manufacturer BYK Additives & Instruments decided to put its digital strategy in the area of marketing and sales to the test back in 2014. The company's external image had become outdated and BYK also wanted to move from a traditional to a modern, digital provider. The central question for the digital strategy was: Which processes and services does BYK want to transfer from the offline world to the internet? Among other things, the measuring instrument manufacturer BYK-Gardner, which is also part of the ALTANA Group, wanted to enable its customers to initiate maintenance orders and order spare parts and consumables via a central online portal.

In future, BYK Additives & Instruments customers should be able to manage all their devices independently via an online self-service. This results in an extensive processing of online service orders: as the instruments are in continuous use, there are around 19,000 service cases over the year.

With the support of external consultants, BYK Additives & Instruments developed a "Future Book". This strategy paper describes where BYK sees itself in 2020 and what steps would be necessary to master this transformation by then.

The project team derived from the requirements of the Future Book that a future solution would have to consist of three software modules:

• Product Information Management (PIM),
• digital publishing and
• e-commerce.

Together with SQLI, BYK initially developed specialised concepts that mapped all strategic topics of the Future Book. After taking stock of the processes at the time, the project team defined specific use cases with the specialist departments.

This resulted in a detailed roadmap that showed how BYK would progress step by step from the big ideas of the Future Book to the introduction of the actual systems. Thanks to the close contact with the specialist departments, there was even another positive development - in many places, the project provided the impetus for important change processes.

The BYK internet and digital strategy is now regarded as a flagship project within the ALTANA Group. By the fourth quarter of 2018, the first versions of the new web shop and the self-service portal had been launched at measuring instrument manufacturer BYK-Gardner. These were based on the data provided by a centralised product information management system.