BASF – cutting through complexity to deliver a clear gap analysis and action plan

BASF “commit to respect human rights in our operations and embrace the responsibility to foster respect for human rights in relationships with our business partners along the value chain, with neighbours in communities, and in the application of our products”. To support this commitment, we were asked to review BASF’s Human Rights Due Diligence approach, define the next steps of development and how to get there. This involved engaging senior leaders from Country to President level to explore how human rights were potentially affected by their everyday and strategic business decisions.

As a large and complex business, it was important to agree and prioritise the data requirements for the gap analysis from the start, along with the list of 40 internal stakeholders to be interviewed. We worked with the human rights and compliance teams to prioritise the data needs and agreed that our analysis should focus on gaining deep insights rather than a broad review of excessively wide-ranging data. It included reviewing existing supplier, buying and portfolio processes alongside insights from the interviews. By going deep, we were able to clearly understand why gaps existed and how they could be closed through changes in processes, systems or behaviour.