Achieving Architecture Transparency

Objectives

After completing this lesson, you will be able to:
  • Understand the CEO’s strategic company goal and how to scope the transformation project.
  • Achieve transparency of your groups current landscape architecture.

Introduction of Case Study

Listen to Konstantin, the CEO of MachinesCo, to understand the company's current operations, IT setup, strategic goals, and the initial steps the management wants you to focus on.

Task

If you have already received your workspace invitation, open your email inbox, search for the "SAP LeanIX Workspace Invitation," and follow the steps to create your credentials and log in to the workspace. If you haven’t received your workspace invitation yet and are participating on-site, locate your group (the instructor will guide you) and use your group's login credentials.

Note

All members of your group are using the same workspace, once a task is completed it is displayed in the workspace for all users.

Achieve Architecture Transparency (As-is-assessment)

Your first task is to get an overview of the current landscape. Architecture transparency entails a comprehensive understanding of your business capabilities, application repository, business processes, integrations and data flows, along with their dependencies and risks. The as-is assessment provides valuable insights for data-driven decision-making and establishes a data foundation that guides your organization along the ERP transformation. The discovery phase consists of three steps:

Step 1. Model SAP LeanIX Fact Sheets and Build Your Repository

If your organization has been using SAP LeanIX, you likely have a complete view of your current architecture. If you're starting with SAP LeanIX for ERP transformation, you need to build that repository. This involves adding key fact sheets, gathering data, and conducting an initial assessment as part of the Application Portfolio Assessment. For an ERP transformation, model these fact sheet types and relationships in SAP LeanIX (Must have and nice to have):

Step 2. Scope ERP Transformation

In this step, you will define the scope of your ERP transformation. The scoping activity should happen in close alignment with your business, with clear ownership of the business capabilities by business owners who understand what business capabilities mean. As an EA leading this effort, you would facilitate those discussions, e.g., as part of scoping workshops. One of the first outcomes of the data gathering and scoping will be a validated business capability map and a view of capabilities in scope.

Step 3. Communicate and Report

In the world of an ERP transformation journey, effective reporting and communication play a pivotal role in driving successful transformations. Share these and other views with your stakeholders to give them full transparency of the as-is architecture and aspects to consider. You should also use the reports to identify any gaps in your data and enrich data if needed.

Hands-On: Establish Architecture Transparency in ERP Transformation

Your task to be conducted in your groups demo workspace: Establish architecture transparency in ERP transformation.

Steps

  1. Model SAP LeanIX Fact Sheets and Build Your Repository

    • In the inventory, enrich the objective fact sheet Modernize ERP systems to single instance by 2027 with the following:

      Description:

      • Add a short description

      Note

      Be creative and remember the CEO's introduction.

      Lifecycle Information:

      • Planned: 2024-08-01
      • Active: 2025-01-01
      • Done: 2028-12-31

    • Enrich your workspace business capabilities by leveraging the SAP reference architecture

      • In the inventory, check how many business capabilities are currently stored.

      • Navigate to your profile > Administration > Reference Catalog > select the industry map, suitable to MaschinesCo Company (Industrial Manufacturing).

      • Import all Finance business capabilities (try list and landscape view).
      • Go back to the inventory and check how the number of business capabilities has changed.

  2. Scope ERP Transformation

    • Navigate to reports and create a new business capability landscape report, named "As-is Business Capability Landscape". Make sure to only include the "in scope" Finance department (use filtering) as the CEO asked you start with and change the view to see the strategic importance of each business capability.

      Note

      Please note that for the purpose of this exercise, we only focus on the pre-filled business capabilities. Since this is a demo workspace, not all of them contain information.
    • Assess the current and target maturity of the business capabilities (use settings) to scope your business transformation and save your report.
    • Tag the business capabilities (5) with the biggest gap between current and target as in scope.
    • Save your report as "As-is Business Capability Landscape".

    Hint

    Helpful Resources: https://docs-eam.leanix.net/docs/tags

    Now that you know on which business capability to focus on, get an overview and understand as-is assessment of your applications and potential opportunities for the scope of your ERP transformation:

    • Open the application landscape report clustered by business capabilities, only showing the tagged as "in scope" business capabilities (advanced filtering) as well as the functional and technical fit of the related applications (settings).
    • Discover the two applications with the poorest values and any application which is phasing out.

    • Change the clustering of the report to find out what organization is using the affected application (settings).

    • Save the report as "In scope As-Is Application Landscape" with unrestricted permission.

  3. Communicate and Report

    • Create a new dashboard and add a short message, explaining that this dashboard provides the overview of the current state of the ERP transformation.
    • Add the two newly created reports to it.

    For easy consumption of the dashboard for all stakeholders ensure that both reports contain a proper title as well as a short subtitle, explaining what they are showing.

    Hint

    Helpful Resources: https://docs-eam.leanix.net/docs/dashboards

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