Flight Levels Day

Two years ago, the BASF Tamol cluster ran its multi-project portfolio on Excel. Nearly 150 people, 5 production plants, over 50 products - and every team in its own silo. No cross-team visibility, no real-time status, no way to see bottlenecks before they hit. Projects were thrown over the fence between departments without warning. "The amount of work was like a bow wave that got bigger every day," as the engineering team described it.

This talk is the practical story of how we implemented and scaled Flight Level 2 coordination at BASF Tamol - not as a theoretical model, but as a working system in a regulated chemical production environment.

We started with one painful process: plant modifications. We visualised it as-is in Businessmap, ran a hands-on multi-project simulation to build conviction across the teams, and went live after just four weeks. The board made the invisible visible: dependencies, blockers, and capacity conflicts that had been hidden in spreadsheets for years.

Then came the hard part: establishing flow. WIP limits, cadences, flow metrics. The numbers tell the story: work in progress of plant changes dropped from around 140 to under 50 projects. Average cycle time fell from 13 months to around 5. Maintenance costs dropped by 30%. Rework cycle times went from over a week to under three days.

From that single process, BASF Tamol scaled Flight Level 2 across the entire cluster. Two main coordination systems now connect to all teams. Every standup, every shift handover across four shifts, every weekly work plan - it all happens on Businessmap boards. Just over 130 users work in the system daily. Email for project updates has been replaced entirely. And product quality climbed to above 99%. In 2026, BASF Tamol is taking the next step: connecting strategy to execution through Flight Level 3.

The plant manager's summary after 18 months captures it well: it is a fundamentally different way of working, with measurable impact on cost, quality, and delivery.

The talk closes with a short glimpse what lies ahead: what could change when you connect AI to a mature Flight Level 2 setup? Businessmap already has a strong internal AI engine and built-in automation capabilities. But the real shift comes when you connect external AI tools on top of that foundation - when clean data and stable flow become the launchpad for something more powerful. We are currently experimenting with autonomous AI agents that work directly inside Businessmap and across the entire tool stack, coordinating across boards, surfacing patterns, and handling routine coordination tasks. This is early-stage work, not a finished product - but it points to where Flight Level 2 systems are heading. Not AI as a chatbot on the side, but AI as a coordination partner embedded in the flow.

Whether you are at the start of your Flight Levels journey or looking to extend an established setup, this session offers concrete takeaways from a real, two-year implementation - including what went wrong, what surprised us, what we would do differently and what lies ahead.