LeanIX Continuous Transformation Platform®
True cloud native SaaS, certified with the highest standards for security and data privacy
See LeanIX in Action
Industry
Aerospace and Defense
Headquarters
Bern, Switzerland
Revenues
€1.87 billion
The Challenge
Over its 20+ year history, RUAG has developed rapidly through mergers and acquisitions and the globalization of its business. As a consequence of investments in various technology, space, and defense companies, the RUAG IT landscape has grown more and more complex. For example, in 2014, RUAG operated over 150 Enterprise Resource Planning-like systems and 17 SAP instances.
This lack of transparency, especially regarding technology risks, had become a major concern of the management team. RUAG needed to establish a unified IT inventory quickly to achieve an overview of the complete IT landscape of the company. The establishment of transparency was a critical first step to enable all further activities.
“The key activity for more transparency in our IT Architecture was to build the LeanIX inventory platform – in a collaborative approach."
Juha Mylläri,
VP IT Architecture, RUAG
The Solution
Creating a virtual EA team
The Board of Directors audit committee agreed on a set of activities to address those challenges. Establishing an Enterprise Architecture practice for the RUAG group was one of them. Juha Mylläri was assigned the role of VP IT Architecture and set off to build a company-wide EA team. He identified suitable candidates in corporate IT and across business divisions to organize them in a virtual Enterprise Architecture community.
The soon-to-be business, application, and technology architects from Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and Sweden came together in Bern to be certified in TOGAF and prepare for their new roles. While the foundation was established, the virtual team still lacked a common collaboration platform to create the IT inventory in a highly distributed setup.
Building the inventory through collaboration
The first step to achieve transparency was to establish an inventory that could be accessed and updated by everybody. Rather than trying to populate the inventory with a central team, RUAG decided on a decentralized approach. The team had seen other approaches to EA fail in the past. Lengthy implementation phases that took over months killed EA activities before they really started. That is where LeanIX came in.
LeanIX was a perfect fit for this collaborative approach: it can be accessed from every browser, which makes collaboration and roll-out easy. In addition, it fits well into the existing tool landscape with its open REST API – RUAG even created their own iPhone app based on it. The LeanIX meta-model contributed to that: “The out-of-the-box meta-model helped us to focus on the real task, instead of discussing a model over weeks.”
Reducing IT complexity in an agile way
With the basic structure and understanding of the IT landscape in place, RUAG established Project Magellan to define its target architecture and transform the companywide ERP landscape. Thanks to new transparency enabled by heat maps and roadmap views, the team was able to clearly visualize technology risks and plan the roadmap for the desired business transformation. Based on out-of-the-box LeanIX visualizations, the team identified a set of harmonization activities around consistent master data creation and the deactivation of redundant systems and interfaces. But they did not stop with the planning.
RUAG improved the ERP landscape in small iterations. At the end of each iteration stood a solution with clear business benefits. To ensure this, the domain business architects engaged with related decision-making boards (e.g. HR, Finance, or PR) on a regular basis to work out the next iteration of the harmonized target architecture. Each one of the divisional CEOs became responsible for realizing and measuring the resulting business outcomes.
The Success
RUAG’s success shows that in today’s world, actionable enterprise architecture is more important than the perfect model:
“IT architecture will indeed never be 100% complete, it adapts dynamically to the needs of our business. LeanIX was the only feasible approach to do this, we couldn’t have allowed to investigate and implement solutions over a long time.”
“The out-of-the-box meta-model helped us to focus on the real task, instead of discussing a model over weeks.”
Juha Mylläri
Don't take our word for it - read about what our customers experienced and how LeanIX helped them to implement a successful EA practice.
EAM
A Greenfield Approach to IT Modernization with C&A and LeanIX
C&A
Consumer | Retail“By providing on-demand, accurate, and configurable overviews of our changing IT landscapes, C&A’s EA team has used LeanIX to work closer with our executive teams and accelerate its digital retail business for the entire organization.”
EAM
How Compass Group Australia built an EA practice from scratch
Compass Group
Consulting | ServicesHow a small EA team was able to collaborate with an agile enterprise architecture tool to manage Shadow/Ghost IT.
SMP
How Degreed Brings Clarity to Software Budgeting and Forecasting
Degreed
Tech | Media | Telecom"The two hardest things to budget for are headcount and software. This has removed a huge planning load for us."
EAM
How Donner & Reuschel AG Reduce IT Complexity with LeanIX
Donner & Reuschel AG
Banking | Financial | Insurance"LeanIX has helped even those in my company who are not enterprise architects. Thanks to this tool, more disciplines can interact together.”
EAM
How DTU Uses LeanIX to Optimize IT Resources
DTU
Public Sector | EducationA research institute like the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), one of the country's and Europe's most renowned engineering schools, is a perfect place to observe the impact of dynamic enterprise architecture management.
EAM
How EBSCO Information Services Implemented a Data-Driven Enterprise Architecture with LeanIX
EAM
Laying a Solid Foundation for the EA Practice at Flynn
Flynn
Industrials | ManufacturingLearn how Flynn used LeanIX to stay on top of the increasing complexity of their software estate, rationalize applications, and manage IT risks.
SMP
How Harry's was able to save 18% on their SaaS spend and discover 153 shadow IT applications in their SaaS portfolio.
Harry's
Consumer | Retail"We were looking for a way to gain control and get visibility into our SaaS spending. LeanIX gave us a peek under the covers in one unified view and helped us budget SaaS tools for the year."