Galp Energia

Galp Energia SGPS S.A. is a Portuguese integrated energy company operating across the full energy value chain—from oil and gas exploration and renewable energy to retail distribution. In undergoing a major energy transition, Galp needed its IT and enterprise architecture function to keep pace with rapid business change.

However, the company was still building its enterprise architecture capabilities, while a lean team was trying to balance increasing project demands with establishing a foundation to support business priorities and guide development teams. Its architecture repository tool was overly complex, not user-friendly, and required a dedicated project to extend its capabilities—leading to low adoption and dependence on vendors.

With knowledge scattered across spreadsheets, Wikipedia pages, and individuals, there were significant gaps and overlaps across the portfolio as well as poor governance and control. Galp’s IT management worked reactively and couldn’t anticipate needs or plan ahead. Also, limited maturity in its enterprise architecture and solution architecture skills caused inefficiencies and misalignment between its IT execution and business objectives.

As a result of these challenges, decision-making was slow. Nuno Martins, enterprise architect at Galp Energia, explains, “We constantly had to identify the right people and sources, yet the information available wasn’t reliable. Consequently, we spent significant time and effort piecing information together while having low confidence in its accuracy, which severely impacted our daily operations.”

Galp sought a centralized view of its application and technology landscape so that it could create a foundation for stronger enterprise architecture practices, better IT and business alignment, and more-confident strategic decision-making.

Galp deployed the SAP LeanIX portfolio to deliver a single source of truth for its application landscape across the organization. It now has a unified, clear view of how components are interconnected, highlighting which applications support specific business capabilities and processes, ownership details, interoperability dependencies, and objectives linked to initiatives and business units.

Martins comments, “SAP LeanIX combines a minimalist design with exceptional user-friendliness, making it intuitive and easy to navigate. The built-in capabilities such as surveys, reports, and dashboards enable holistic visualizations of our enterprise landscape while fostering collaboration through user input. Most important, the dynamic metamodel can be autonomously extended to meet our specific needs.” The metamodel includes objectives, business processes, IT components, initiatives, data objects, and organizational structures. Empowering employees to contribute relevant information helps ensure that the architecture repository remains as accurate and up-to-date as possible.

Galp uses the high-level architecture diagrams and executive dashboards in SAP LeanIX to assess the transformational impact of initiatives on its landscape and visualize the current versus future state of its architecture. This supports strategic planning and executive decision-making. Specifically, the diagrams provide the big picture of capabilities, processes, applications, and technology layers, helping employees understand interconnectivity and dependencies across different domains. And the dashboards drive real-time, measurable insights and portfolio knowledge by aggregating KPIs, portfolio health, capability maturity, and risk indicators. Martins outlines, “The diagrams show us what the landscape will look like and what will change, while the dashboards show us if we’re on the right track strategically and operationally. It’s the combination of structural clarity and measurable performance that creates a robust foundation for informed, architecture-compliant strategic planning.”

The company also uses the survey functionality to engage business and IT teams in classifying portfolio strategy, especially around rationalization and modernization initiatives.

Galp launched a program to identify IT modernization and rationalization opportunities by using SAP LeanIX insights along with expertise from a multidisciplinary forum. The subsequent initiatives carried out over 18 months enabled the business to map more than 500 applications, streamline its landscape by removing several high-cost applications, and achieve annual savings of over €1 million.

The energy company assessed its applications based on functional suitability, technical fit, business criticality, and cost. By mapping its application landscape and establishing clear links to business capabilities and organizational units, Galp quickly identified redundancies and developed strategies to reduce complexity.

Democratizing access to knowledge has resulted in stronger alignment between the business, IT, and operations teams, who can now work with the same data based on a shared understanding of the enterprise landscape. This has created transparency and trust between the governance and delivery teams. Making architecture insights accessible on demand across the organization has led to greater cross-functional collaboration and faster decision-making and impact analysis. Galp has also improved compliance by enabling its employees to autonomously check compliance with target architectures.

Martins says, “We can now generate reports that show which projects and initiatives support specific business goals, understand our current architecture state, and gain visibility into our future state. This alignment is critical because it helps ensure that our IT and business teams share a common perspective, linking strategy to execution and enabling them to work together toward the same objectives.”

Through the program, Galp has realized that its enterprise architecture transformation has been about creating the right conditions—such as good governance, literacy, and accountability—for SAP LeanIX to generate value. The company positioned the solutions as a shared enterprise repository, and it adopted an iterative approach to continuously track data quality, lifecycle information, usage, and employee satisfaction through KPIs and governance routines.