(As published in the September, 2001 issue of Compoundings magazine.)

During his 30 years as a Division I college basketball referee, John Bellanti would travel to various cities to officiate ballgames, while holding down his day job with the Battenfeld Grease and Oil Corp. of New York. While the additional time demands and travel might serve to distract some from their primary responsibilities, Bellanti put his role as a referee to work for him.

“Mr. [Nathan] Rosen, the owner of the company at the time, used to say to me, ‘John, why does it seem that we have a customer in every city in the U.S. that you referee in?’” Bellanti recalls. “I would smile and say, ‘Because we’re good marketers, that’s why.’”

Perhaps a combination of Bellanti’s industrious approach to the business and the quality of the company and its products are responsible for the success of what today is among the largest independent lubricant manufacturers in the world. And while the company’s management team may, indeed, be good marketers, it is turning to the Internet to help develop new business opportunities and better serve even those customer relationships established by Bellanti while attending those hoops games across the country.

Today, the Battenfeld organization is in the process of implementing an eCommerce platform that will enable it to remain in constant communication with its customers, market its range of quality products both nationally and on a global scale and, most importantly, enable customers old and new to complete transactions effortlessly from virtually anywhere in the world, at any time of day or night.

Big and Getting Bigger

While Bellanti’s efforts in the early days certainly impacted the success of the business, his shining moment came in 1983, when he had the opportunity to purchase the company from Rosen.

“Mr. Rosen was getting up there in age, over the 65 mark, and he became a bit more aware of his own mortality,” Bellanti recalls. “He knew no one in his family was really interested in running the business, so he felt he should try to sell it. After some time, he came to me and said, ‘You’ve been running the company for me for a number of years and you’d be the natural person to buy it.’ So, we went to our banking facility and they knew I had been running the business for about eight years and they had enough confidence in me.”

And the bankers would not be sorry. Today, the 62-year-old Battenfeld organization encompasses four operating units: the original Battenfeld Grease and Oil, in Tonawanda, NY, American Lubricants in Buffalo, which serves industrial plants in western New York through to Warren Ohio; Battenfeld Grease Canada, which serves customers north of the border, and Sulflo, Inc., which markets cutting oils. It is also perhaps the only independent lubricant manufacturer whose plants have received both the ISO 9001 and QS 9000 certifications.

Unlike his predecessor, Bellanti has been joined in the business by several of his family members, and the chain of succession at Battenfeld is firmly in place. In addition to his long-time business partner, Paul Converso, who serves as the company’s vice president of sales and marketing, Bellanti’s daughter, Barbara, has served as vice president of American Lubricants and is now a vice president with Battenfeld Grease and Oil. Bellanti’s son, John, Jr., is also a vice president and serves as plant manager at Battenfeld-American. Another daughter, Debra Carpenter, manages the American Lubricants offices and her husband, Paul, serves as plant manager of the North Tonawanda, N.Y. facility. Bellanti’s youngest daughter, Janice, chose a career in law over a career in lubricants, but her husband, John Kirk, serves as general manager of Battenfeld’s Canadian facility.

“Paul [Converso] has been here for 26 years and he wants to get in the will, but we’re still discussing that,” Bellanti says with a grin. “It’s kind of a family affair we have going on here.”

eBusiness Strategy

But when it comes to strategy and the company’s plans for eBusiness, Converso is, indeed, a key member of the Battenfeld family. The company had its first Web site up and running in the early days of eBusiness – 1994 – and Converso sees tremendous opportunity for the company to employ eBusiness as a means to manage its global business and worldwide business opportunities.

“We’re trying to get a couple of things accomplished here,” Converso says. “One is to establish the quickest, most efficient means of communication with our customers. The other is to continue growing the business. That was why we built the Web site in the first place. I think we were among the first ILMA members to have a Web site. So very early on, we had the means of establishing that communication with our customers.”

But the greatest benefit of eBusiness to a company like Battenfeld, according to Converso, is the ability to expose the company to potential new customers far and wide. For Battenfeld, it’s nearly the equivalent of having John Bellanti referee basketball games throughout the U.S., Europe, Asia and the Pacific Rim on a daily basis.

“In other words, a guy in Korea can get on the net and look at our site, which includes pictures of all the plants and capabilities and promotes that we are ISO 9001 and QS 9000 certified,” Converso says. “You get exposure way beyond the normal population of potential customers you are working on.”

But it’s one thing to use the Web as a marketing tool, which Battenfeld has done successfully. It’s another to use it as a means through which to conduct business transactions, which is now underway at Battenfeld. The company is currently working with FuelQuest Inc. to establish the capability to reliably complete entire business transactions online with customers old and new, 24x7.

“We started talking to FuelQuest because we wanted to take our Web presence to the next level,” Converso says. “The combination of the net and what FuelQuest provides us, in terms of being able to conduct business transactions online, allows us to go after customers that we could not have in the past, both in the U.S. and abroad.”

The First Steps

“Battenfeld Grease and Oil is a global operation that can benefit substantially from the efficiency and marketing power of eBusiness,” says Jeff Irwin, FuelQuest’s regional sales manager who worked closely with Battenfeld in developing and implementing the company’s eBusiness strategy. “Using FuelQuest's eBusiness tools, an organization like Battenfeld can rapidly reach its goals of domestic and global expansion and constant communication with customers and prospects around the world."

Battenfeld began taking the first steps toward bringing its Web presence to the “next level” at its Sulflo site, implementing FuelQuest’s Supplier Online solution to enable customers to complete orders of cutting oils and other Sulflo products online. During the implementation process, all of Sulflo’s existing customer data, billing and ship-to information was loaded into the Supplier Online system. Sulflo then assigned its customers unique user names and passwords with which to access the system.

With their user names and passwords, Sulflo customers can access a secure section of the Sulflo site, where they can peruse the company’s catalog of products, place orders to multiple ship-to locations and complete payment or initiate the billing process. With Supplier Online, Sulflo is also capable of setting customer-specific pricing, so each customer logging into the system will view products with prices that they have negotiated prior. For new customers or those who have not negotiated specific pricing, Sulflo has the option of presenting standard pricing or no pricing at all – on an item-by-item basis.

As customers place their orders through the Supplier Online system at Sulflo’s site, an order history is compiled and updated, so a customer seeking to replenish orders of previously purchased product can do so with just a few mouse clicks.

The Sulflo site also provides customers with easy access to up-to-date Materials Safety Data Sheets (MSDS) and Product Data Sheets, saving the Sulflo staff time responding to requests for faxed MSDS. The site also includes industry news and information that is updated automatically on a daily basis, and an “Ask The Experts” feature, that enables Sulflo to provide expert assistance to customers on a range of product-related matters, with assistance from FuelQuest.

Once Sulflo was up and running online, the company then turned to its American Lubricants operation, loading its complete catalog of products and training its staff on use of the Supplier Online platform. Battenfeld Grease and Oil would follow.

“We feel this places us at the forefront of technology, where our biggest customers want us to be,” Converso says. “The Internet gets us the exposure. Then, once we start working with new customers, we have the opportunity to do business with them using this new technology. It all meshes together very well and will help us grow and become more of a force in this business. It will also make us a more efficient operating organization.”

Considering the successful track record of Battenfeld Grease and Oil of New York before the days of the eBusiness, the future looks pretty bright, indeed.