How BASF Intelligently Migrates and Maintains Salesforce Data for Long-term Success

In today's fast-paced digital landscape, managing vast amounts of data securely and smoothly is critical for global corporations. It was and remains pivotal for unlocking the value of Salesforce capabilities at BASF. For the world’s largest chemical producer, a major challenge was to ensure that its data flows seamlessly to a new Salesforce org, its primary customer relationship management (CRM) platform, while aligning the system with the unique needs of its Agricultural Products division.

To achieve this, BASF started its partnership with conemis and leveraged the power of conemis transition cloud (ctc), ensuring that large-scale data migration was not just successful but that success of the new Salesforce org was sustainable over the long term.

Migration Challenges Met with Intelligence

Over the past three years, BASF has embarked on a digitalization journey, beginning with the monumental task of splitting its global Salesforce org. For the Agricultural Products (AP) division, the goal was to migrate 3,500 users from the global org to a dedicated, tailored system that could meet the specific needs of the division. This migration involved 60 countries, 90 Salesforce objects, and over 19,000 field mappings. The complexity was further heightened by the tight project deadlines and the high stakes of ensuring uninterrupted CRM operations.

This project is only the first of many in an ongoing Salesforce program. BASF has continued to use conemis to incorporate data from an MDM and commerce systems into its AP Salesforce org, ensuring that all internal business processes remain as seamless as possible. With the help of conemis transition cloud, the team was able to automate workflows, reducing manual efforts and speeding up the entire process.

Sustaining the Success: Ongoing Maintenance and Synchronization

Post the initial major migration, the challenge shifted to keeping the system running and evolving it smoothly. BASF had to perform regular housekeeping tasks within Salesforce, including syncing 4 million accounts and their hierarchies between the MDM system and Salesforce. Initially, a different synchronization solution was considered, but it was unable to handle the complexity of the task. Enter conemis once again, which has now processed over 1.5 billion records for BASF AP.

The solution was simple but effective:

Workflows configured in conemis transition cloud enabled the extraction and synchronization of data in scheduled, automated steps. This ongoing migration automation let BASF’s team handle the sheer volume of data successfully and even freed them up to focus on higher-value activities rather than being bogged down by repetitive tasks.

Talhelm reflects on the impact:

"The housekeeping within Salesforce and the synchronization with our MDM system run reliably. With over 1.5B records already processed automatically with conemis, the BASF team has become very efficient in managing our large data volumes and can direct their efforts toward more strategic tasks instead of being caught up in tedious routine operations."

Looking Forward: More Data, More AI, More Solutions

The journey doesn’t end here for BASF. More projects are on the horizon, including integrating additional Salesforce orgs, consolidating third-party data, further optimization of MDM synchronizations, and unlocking value with AI. The company continues to rely on conemis’ solution to handle the complexity and scale of its ongoing Salesforce transformation initiative.

A Partnership for the Future

The ongoing collaboration between BASF and conemis is a testament to the power of intelligent data migration and CRM maintenance solutions. By investing in a robust, flexible system, BASF has been able to accelerate its digital transformation efforts while reducing the time and cost involved in complex data migration projects.

For other global organizations facing similar challenges, BASF’s experience offers a blueprint for success: Partner with the right solutions provider and invest in a sustainable migration tool to be prepared for smooth adaption and evolution of your systems over time.

As BASF continues to leverage conemis transition cloud for ongoing and future work, the story is clear: Intelligent data migration isn’t just about moving data – it’s about doing it in a way that ensures reliability, longevity, scalability, and ongoing success.

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