FANUC Europe uses SAP LeanIX to map and support their massive BOOST project

FANUC is the world's leading producer of computer numerical control (CNC) systems, industrial robots and CNC machines.

FANUC Europe started using SAP LeanIX as a repository in 2019 to document their applications. At the time, the company's applications were being documented and cataloged by several different people, and the information was not centralized. In 2021 Enterprise Architecture has been established with Carsten Schubert as the European Enterprise Architect at FANUC Europe. At that point of time FANUC started to utilize LeanIX with all its features and its full potential. Carsten Schubert , wanted a single, comprehensive view of FANUC Europe’s ICT across the company.In 2022, FANUC Europe began its BOOST project. This was a major ERP transformation, migrating from Oracle's J.D. Edwards (Enterprise One) ERP to SAP S4/HANA.

 "Many of FANUC Europe's sales engineers were requesting enhancements to the ERP system," Schubert explained. "We were constantly making modifications and adjusting the software to our processes, but we didn't have a comprehensive overview of all these changes to our ERP ecosystem."  

Changes made in the system would affect several other areas, sometimes in negative ways. This was a significant problem. The huge number of changes to objects, programs, reports, and other things made it harder and harder to update systems. This hindered efficiency and drained resources. 

"Our main goal was to migrate to SAP S/4HANA and standardize our processes to make it easier to maintain and support it.", said Volker Maennle (Chief Information Officer). “We wanted a new ERP with a greenfield approach and as much standardized software and processes as possible and also to reduce the various existing legacy interfaces. SAP LeanIX played a critical part in achieving that."

FANUC Europe’s Boost project began in 2022. This was a large-scale endeavor to increase operational efficiency. FANUC Europe hired a large consulting firm with expertise in SAP best practices to assist with the project. The project goals were:

• Optimize business processes based on SAP & industry best practices  o Enable customer self-service and automation

• Create a single source of truth for critical company data

• Rationalize the application landscape

• Simplify the company's operating model 

"The consulting firm looked into FANUC Europe's processes and gave us a large Excel files, which I imported", said Schubert. "This was a tedious endeavor because e.g. the file containing Business Capabilities had several hundred lines, and we had to make sure there were no errors in it. We further had hundreds of applications, data objects, and interfaces that needed to be categorized and updated for the transformation. With SAP LeanIX, I was able to create that comprehensive inventory and map these elements to their business capabilities. Meanwhile we created more than 6000 Transformations for modeling the different go-live approaches.”

FANUC is a global company, its European subsidiary FANUC Europe is operating in many different regions inside and outside of the EU, and different regions have different business focuses. They needed to migrate their European ERP, which had many different business processes and applications. Hence FANUC Europe decided to go live in several phases, starting in 3 of its more than 20 European subsidiaries.  So having different business models, legislations and environment (EU / non EU) a broad area is covered.

In the second phase other affiliates and European Headquarter will follow. The headquarter located in Luxembourg had unique processes that other business units do not. It is the location of the office warehouse and customization center for all of Europe. Here FANUC Europe does all its customer specific customization of pre-configured products. Other warehouses in other regions had their own unique processes.

While some affiliates with special requirements would stay on JD Edwards to go live in a third phase, the headquarter had to switch to SAP S/4HANA. That meant that records and documentation had to switch to SAP S/4HANA, as well as the interfaces directing to anything JD Edwards. It also meant there would be interim phases with a mixed set of ERPs and interim interfaces. This would be a multi-phase approach with subsidiaries migrating at different times.

"As you can imagine, it was really a big task to figure out which interfaces to put in place and what had to be done during the switchover," said Schubert. "We knew that at certain points we would be switching off many applications and many interfaces and switching on certain products from SAP that we haven't used before. We had to be certain about what would happen when we did that, and which business processes and capabilities would be affected."

SAP LeanIX Services supported FANUC Europe with Pace-Layering Assessment to set a recommendation for each level one and level two Business Capabilities to find their importance. First is a survey:

Mapping all applications, interfaces, data objects, and components to business capabilities would be critical for the ERP transformation to succeed. "The biggest challenge we had was the huge number of actions related to this project,” said Schubert. “And at certain points in the transformation, we would have completely different data flows. We were modeling data objects together with our MDM team. We had data objects and we had applications processing data objects in a certain way, and I had to map the data objects to applications and components and ensure this was documented.

LeanIX supported us here in creating our consistency checks:

• If you have two applications as leading system on the same data object, there is a mismatch.

• If you have two applications connected by an interface which has a certain data object, but that data object is not held by both applications, that’s also a mismatch.

• It's the same for applications that have a component that is outdated or scheduled to be retired and/or replaced.

• How important is that application? Do we need it to keep running when the component is switched off? How do we plan for that scenario?

This was where SAP LeanIX was indispensable."

Equally important was creating a timeline with defined milestones that was flexible and adaptable to unforeseen events and challenges. 

"With SAP LeanIX, it is very easy to move milestones in the road map and show the progress of our transformation over time with reports. And we can use simple diagrams to see data flows across our applications and how they are all connected. We can track any metrics or other KPIs that are important on this transformation journey. We can be sure we covered everything when we go from one transition step to the next, especially when we go live."

“For example, if you're talking to upper management, they are not focusing on details. They want a high-level overview of what's happening, and they often want visualizations that are easy to understand. A good example of this is the Application Portfolio Report when using the TIME (Tolerate, Invest, Migrate, Eliminate) framework. There is an intuitive visualization on how applications are evolving over time. For example, applications categorized for elimination are visually distinct in red bubbles, allowing stakeholders to see a reduction in legacy applications, while investments in new or improved applications are highlighted in green bubbles. These visualizations show the effects of business transformation projects on your IT landscape.” 

[Application Portfolio Report allows you to manipulate your application portfolio to better understand the results of your application rationalization assessment and see how the landscape will change] 

SAP LeanIX enabled FANUC Europe to simplify and summarize important information so that many different stakeholders could understand it intuitively. "On the other hand, IT managers may want to take a deeper dive and see detailed technical information behind certain applications or components (picture below). SAP LeanIX makes this much easier, because instead of having to dig through PowerPoint presentations or Excel spreadsheets, you can simply view everything directly in a single source of truth. 

SAP LeanIX also enabled stakeholders to see different attributes within the same report. For example, you can view an application's functional and/or technical fit, then switch to view business criticality to determine which business-critical applications are affected by the migration. You can see which interfaces become active in which phase of the project, and which interfaces become inactive. It's much easier to convince stakeholders when they can see that it's not just some pictures or a spreadsheet, it's reliable data with valuable insight."

A major efficiency improvement has been FANUC Europe's service desk. "The Fact Sheets clearly document team members' roles," said Schubert. "They can see who owns an application is and who is responsible for the data in the fact sheets. For example, when you're looking for somebody who can tell you something about the SAP module, you can go right into SAP LeanIX Portal and find the business owner and others who are responsible for that. And that helps a lot. This is not only for SAP applications, but all applications that touch our ERP, like Salesforce, ServiceNow, and other tools."

Furthermore, SAP LeanIX has improved FANUC Europe’s obsolescence and compliance risk management. They use the solution to check the relationships between components and applications and/or interfaces to see if and when a component needs to be retired. They can also easily track GDPR-relevant data and create an audit report when needed. Previously, this was another manual task that was inefficient and time-consuming.