Customer Success Story

Norfolk Southern: Creating a robust enterprise architecture to enhance service reliability

Industry

Travel and transportation

Region

Atlanta, Georgia

Company Size

19,000 employees

350

applications managed in SAP LeanIX.

central application for architecture documentation and decisions.

"With SAP LeanIX, we can identify how applications interface and how the data passes between them—critical for our resiliency efforts."

Darrell Hobson
Enterprise Architect, Norfolk Southern

Driving innovation to build the railroad of the future

With a history that spans almost two centuries, Norfolk Southern runs one of the most expansive rail networks in the United States, covering more than 19,200 route miles across 22 states. Focusing on advancing the safety, efficiency, and sustainability of rail transport, the company is committed to harnessing technology to drive innovation and help ensure reliable freight deliveries for its customers.

The effective management of Norfolk Southern’s IT landscape is crucial to the safe and efficient running of the railroad. However, with information about the enterprise architecture scattered across different locations, it was difficult for IT staff to get an overview and gain insights into how critical applications interacted. To address this, the company wanted a single solution that would provide ready access to enterprise-wide application information, making it easier to manage the IT landscape centrally.

Creating a central workplace for enterprise architects and solution teams

Norfolk Southern selected the SAP LeanIX solution to improve management of its enterprise architecture. A customer success manager from SAP worked closely with the IT team throughout the deployment as part of the Customer First program, providing guidance to support a smooth transition.

Containing comprehensive details about 350 applications as well as governance standards, SAP LeanIX acts as a centralized repository for the company’s enterprise architecture information. It also provides users with a clear overview of the IT landscape, with visualizations of the enterprise architecture and interdependencies between applications. In addition, the solution integrates with a third-party configuration management database, helping ensure that users can access the latest data about IT applications and their configurations.

Thanks to an intuitive user experience, SAP LeanIX has seen strong adoption, becoming a central workplace for solution teams and enterprise architects. Meanwhile, support for architecture review board processes enables users across the company to collaborate on conceptual designs and approval decisions on changes to the IT environment.

"Everyone that uses SAP LeanIX likes the ease of use and simplicity of the solution."

Darrell Hobson
Enterprise Architect, Norfolk Southern

Accelerating decision-making to support a more resilient IT landscape

With SAP LeanIX in place and 350 applications managed using the solution, Norfolk Southern now has greater clarity about its IT landscape. Better visibility of the enterprise architecture means that IT teams can make faster, more-confident decisions about making changes or deploying new applications.

Meanwhile, visualizations allow nontechnical personnel to understand proposed changes, helping IT communicate them to senior management and gain executive buy-in. This has led to a cultural shift that is seeing enterprise architects engaged earlier in projects, enabling them to provide strategic support.

Increased transparency also makes it easier to assess the impact of technology changes. Enterprise architects can see how different applications interface with each other and what impact sunsetting one application could have on another. What’s more, the ability to run outage impact analyses is helping the team increase the operational resilience of its IT environment by understanding dependencies between critical applications.

"Executive management was impressed with the visual reporting. It helped us show not just where we are, but where we’re going."

Darrell Hobson
Enterprise Architect, Norfolk Southern

Evolving the IT environment to support the railroad of tomorrow

Norfolk Southern is currently working on transferring the management of all its applications to SAP LeanIX. Following that, it’s planning to use the solution to support a rationalization program, removing applications that are redundant or have duplicate functionalities. With the support of SAP LeanIX, the company is now on the way to reduce the complexity of the IT landscape, lowering cost of ownership and IT maintenance costs.

Norfolk Southern is also looking at defining custom KPIs that will enable it to monitor its evolving IT environment, helping it develop and effectively manage a future-ready systems landscape. In addition, the company is exploring how it can automate enterprise architecture processes and monitoring to help improve efficiency and support increased resilience.