MEDICE Health Family: Collaborating across business and IT to design a platform for driving innovation in holistic healthcare

MEDICE Arzneimittel Pütter GmbH & Co. KG (MEDICE Health Family) is a German family business on a mission to shape the future of medicine. Ten years ago, it was a pharmaceutical manufacturer. Today, it develops and distributes innovative, multimodal healthcare solutions that combine pharmaceutical, nutritional, and digital elements, including digital health applications. Transforming its business model required an extensive overhaul of its IT environment. The process began with the use of SAP Signavio solutions to map and optimize business processes, followed by a complete overhaul of the company’s ERP system.

MEDICE took a bold approach by implementing a new cloud ERP system: SAP S/4HANA. Rather than trying to recreate all the customized functionality it had in its old ERP system, MEDICE introduced other solutions alongside the new ERP, including a manufacturing execution system (MES) and a laboratory information management system (LIMS). However, with so many systems and fragmented documentation in silos, the company lacked a single source of truth.

To address this challenge, MEDICE adopted SAP LeanIX, a portfolio of enterprise architecture management solutions. “We chose LeanIX because we suddenly started to see things from different perspectives,” MEDICE’s Enterprise Architect, Dr. Björn Kruse, tells us. “What convinced us was the way information converges and is presented in an aggregated form. You get comprehensive transparency, even at an early stage. LeanIX isn’t just an IT tool. It acts as a translator between business and IT. It’s a strategic instrument for actively shaping and managing digital transformation.”

By integrating SAP Signavio, SAP LeanIX, and the SAP Cloud ALM solution—a cloud-based tool for application lifecycle management (ALM)—MEDICE created a seamless toolchain that connects business processes with technical architecture:

• SAP LeanIX serves as the strategic backbone, enabling transparency and capability-based planning.

• SAP Signavio enriches this with process-level insights.

• SAP Cloud ALM supports lifecycle management and transport orchestration.

This end-to-end visibility enables strategic planning, compliance alignment, and agile decision-making across departments. SAP Signavio and SAP LeanIX work in synergy: process insights from SAP Signavio feed into architectural decisions in SAP LeanIX. SAP LeanIX provides a systematic way to analyze and prioritize business capabilities—an essential enabler in making strategic architecture decisions.

SAP LeanIX was adopted as part of a broader transformation aimed at improving enterprise architecture visibility. Its adoption led to the creation of the enterprise architect role at MEDICE—a position that did not previously exist. Dr. Kruse, who now holds this role, played a key part in demonstrating its strategic value. Acting as a bridge between business and IT, he ensures that architectural decisions are aligned with organizational goals, regulatory requirements, and long-term planning. This marks a cultural shift at MEDICE, embedding enterprise architecture management at the heart of innovation and transformation.

By using SAP LeanIX, MEDICE was able to visualize and communicate its target architecture across all SAP project sub-streams. This enabled consistent roadmap planning and helped to eliminate redundant solutions. For example, by aligning capabilities across departments, MEDICE identified and consolidated overlapping tools into a single solution, streamlining IT architecture and supporting the company’s strategic goal of reducing IT costs by 15%.

SAP LeanIX also enabled MEDICE to incorporate business capabilities into its planning processes. By layering these capabilities across departments, the company gained a clearer understanding of which were critical—especially in regulated areas such as computer system validation (CSV). This approach helped MEDICE to identify overlaps, prioritize investments, and align IT decisions with business needs.

In a regulatory context, SAP Signavio plays a vital role in supporting good manufacturing practice (GMP) and good laboratory practice (GLP), among other good practices (GxP), which are essential for ensuring product quality and regulatory compliance in the pharmaceutical industry. Leveraging SAP Signavio’s process transparency and documentation traceability enables MEDICE to ensure its workflows meet stringent regulatory requirements—an indispensable capability in the life sciences sector. Without SAP LeanIX, MEDICE would not have had the transparency or strategic overview required to manage and transform its complex IT landscape during the greenfield implementation of SAP S/4HANA. SAP LeanIX allowed MEDICE to consolidate its fragmented documentation, align its business and IT perspectives, and create a single source of truth across departments—none of which would have been possible using traditional tools and siloed data.