Introducing to SAP LeanIX

Start: Value of SAP LeanIX for application and business owners

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Why take this course on enterprise architecture and SAP LeanIX as an application or business owner? Your organization started using SAP LeanIX, and you are asked to contribute data or information to create an overall enterprise architecture practice and overview.

Nevertheless, SAP LeanIX has relevant value to your daily work, so let's explore it.

Step 1: Single source of truth & architecture overview

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On a larger scale, you support the whole organization in gaining IT transparency, which should be a single source of truth for all your IT and business data. By providing continuous input and maintaining data, you ensure the correct and complete data are available in SAP LeanIX and help the organization gain transparency in its application landscape.

Step 2: Current data on applications and responsibles

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Correct and complete data in SAP LeanIX ensures that all relevant data is found easily, e.g., on applications and responsible colleagues. Information for each application is captured on a "one-pager," including subscriptions containing information on the responsible that you might want to contact or need to collaborate with.

Step 3: Guardrails on your information

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SAP LeanIX provides more than a clear overview of your organization's IT and business. It can help you find contact information, relevant application data, specific reports in detail, and your subscriptions by simple filtering actions.

Step 4: Project Planning

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Finally, you can accelerate your ongoing projects and have all subscribed applications and their up-to-date tech stack in one place.

Step 5: Analysis and assessment of application portfolio

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Your Application Portfolio Management dashboard summarizes your IT and business. This dashboard offers many KPIs, such as the number of live applications by business capabilities in your portfolio, and it can be filtered by different periods (from 1 week up to 1 year).

Summary

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Some of your benefits include having all your IT and business data in one place, finding information easily, generating reports, and collaborating with others on your ongoing projects. With this course, we want to help you navigate SAP LeanIX easily, understand these benefits and gain even larger insights then mentioned.

1. Dashboards
2. Inventory
3. Reports and Diagrams
4. Collaboration
5. My profile
   

We will focus on the inventory that you will interact with most. As responsible for one or more applications, your contribution will immensely help the organization gain a better and more accurate picture of its IT landscape.

1. An application fact sheet example

   Each item has its own fact sheet to store relevant information.

   To capture information about an application, you would use the application fact sheet type.

   This is an example of a fact sheet created for the AC Management application.

2. Mandatory attributes

   Every fact sheet includes attributes such as lifecycle, technical fit, functional fit, etc., which need to be filled, checked and updated regularly.

3. Create a new application fact sheet

   To document different applications in the tool, you would create individual fact sheets for each application you wish to document, by clicking on this button.

Fact sheets form the foundation of the meta model and are grouped into four different architectural layers. The meta model is like a blueprint that defines the relationships between different architectural elements and how the information in fact sheets is interconnected (for example, how business capabilities rely on applications). The meta model is effective out-of-the-box, but can be customized.

Take a look at one of our Academy videos below. It briefly explains the foundations of the SAP LeanIX meta model.

Below is the high-level representation of the out-of-the-box meta model. As a fact sheet owner, you will mainly work with the application fact sheet type and should familiarize yourself with it. Feel free to explore the graphics below to understand other fact sheet types, but they are not expected to be understood in detail, as they will not be in your focus as a fact sheet owner.

Start: SAP LeanIX Meta Model relations

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At the heart of SAP LeanIX, the fundamental aspect is grasping the relations between fact sheets, such as applications used in different organizations.

Step 1: Hierarchical relations

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These relations describe parent-child relationships, e.g., level 1, level 2 and level 3 organizations.

Step 2: Generic relations

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These relations are across different are same types of fact sheets without hierarchy, i.e., organization using an application, an application supporting a business capability, and initiative contributing to an objective etc.

Step 3: Overview of the application fact sheet relations

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This image shows the most common relations for the application fact sheet.

Completed!

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For more detailed fact sheet relations, you can visit our documentation on the meta model.