Introduction:
Building a comprehensive inventory of applications, technologies, and their relations can be a complex and time-consuming process, as it involves collecting and structuring unstructured data from various sources across your organization.
SAP LeanIX provides various options to simplify and accelerate this process with features like:
- inventory builder,
- automated discovery capabilities through various integrations
- bulk data import through spreadsheets
- and more
Inventory Builder
| What | Why | How |
|---|---|---|
| Inventory builder uses AI to analyze diagrams and images to automatically extract relevant architectural elements. The analysis discovers appropriate fact sheets and their relationships, which you can review and create corresponding fact sheets to accelerate your inventory-building process. | Inventory builder is particularly useful in the initial stage as the ability to quickly transform unstructured data into structured information accelerates adoption and stakeholder onboarding. For a more detailed guide, see Inventory Builder. | You can upload various artefacts like data flow diagrams, value stream charts, and images. As you do, the system automatically suggests the types of fact sheets being extracted. To improve accuracy, you can provide additional context about the document’s content through prompts. Text: Click here to watch the how-to video about SAP LeanIX Inventory Builder. |
Note
If needed, you can refine the prompt, rerun the analysis, and get a refined list of suggested fact sheets and relations.
SaaS Discovery
| What | Why | How |
|---|---|---|
| SaaS discovery automatically discovers your organization's Software as a Service (SaaS) applications through integrations with your organization's cloud security and access management solutions. | SaaS discovery is an effective way to kickstart the process of building your application inventory. | Once you set up the integration, the system discovers your organization's SaaS, allowing you to review them and either create new fact sheets or link them to existing ones. These fact sheets are also connected to the corresponding reference catalog items, ensuring fact sheets are pre-filled with standardized and up-to-date information. |
Note
SAP Landscape Discovery
| What | Why | How |
|---|---|---|
| The SAP landscape discovery discovers your SAP cloud and on-premise services and systems, helping you build a comprehensive inventory of your organization’s SAP landscape. Discovered services and systems are listed in an inbox, where you can review them and either create new fact sheets or link them to existing ones. | By automatically identifying your SAP cloud and on-premise services, it greatly reduces time-consuming manual efforts and ensures you have an accurate, up-to-date inventory of your SAP landscape. | The SAP landscape discovery feature also ensures you align with our modeling best practices as services and systems that are not modeled as applications are automatically skipped and not listed in the SAP discovery inbox. The SAP landscape discovery feature is especially valuable for ERP transformation initiatives. For a more detailed guide, see SAP Landscape Discovery. |
Hint
SAP LeanIX offers various other integrations and discovery features to quickly bring in data from multiple systems. As your EA practice evolves, you can leverage these capabilities to enhance data accuracy and streamline inventory management. To learn more about all available integration and discovery features, see Discovery and Integrations.
Importing Fact Sheet Data Through Excel File
When your organization has pre-collated enterprise architecture data, you can easily import and create fact sheets in bulk through Excel spreadsheets. This is one of the most common approaches for bringing data into your workspace, especially when starting out.
Using the import function, you can do the following:
- Create new fact sheets
- Populate empty attributes of fact sheet
- Update existing fact sheet values
- Delete fact sheet values
- Archive fact sheets
Note
Hint
Leverage reference catalog and survey to maintain and improve the quality and completeness of your data.
The reference catalog in SAP LeanIX is a curated database that provides standardized reference data for business capabilities, applications, IT components, and technology categories. By linking fact sheets to corresponding reference catalog items, you can ensure accurate, up-to-date, and industry-aligned information. To learn more, see Reference Catalog.
Surveys enable you to crowdsource data from relevant stakeholders to enrich fact sheet data. By including fact sheet elements in the surveys, the responses received are directly updated in the fact sheets. To learn more, see Surveys.