AkzoNobel is a Dutch company whose product portfolio is divided into three business areas: Decorative Paints, Performance Coatings and Specialty Chemicals. The latter is currently carved out – it is not decided yet if it will be sold or listed. With over 14 billion euros in revenue and 46.000 employees, the chemical giant is facing rough waters externally. At the same time, AkzoNobel has empowered employees to positively confront the future, and to curiously investigate how its internal processes could be improved.

AkzoNobel missed transparency of what happened in its end-to-end core processes, such as Purchase-to-Pay. As advanced as the BI reporting was, it lacked the visualization of the process flow, and of what caused deviations. “Pulling pieces of the process together with bird eye perspective means weeks if not months of work when it comes to collecting information from BW in complicated manner”, explains Nina van Krimpen, Purchase-to-Pay subject matter expert. “The company sensed what the issues were but was having difficulty in understanding overall root causes“.