Customer Success Story

Massmart: Keeping prices competitive with a centralized process and IT landscape

Industry

Retail

Headquarters

Sandton, South Africa

Employees

45000+

1 Central

repository for IT and business processes

Better Alignment

between business processes and IT applications

Key highlights

Reduced effort and cost to implement changes through better process transparency
Enhanced quality control at the project management office (PMO) level by adapting changes quickly to business processes
Expanded process management from IT to business users by mapping applications to processes
Improved understanding of the business impact of applications on processes and of processes on applications

About Massmart:

With more than 300 stores across eight sub-Saharan countries, Massmart’s diverse retail and wholesale formats are widely recognized and differentiated across general merchandise, liquor, home improvement, and wholesale food markets. Massmart’s focus on high-volume, low-cost, and responsible business practices helps the company save customers money so they can live better.

To continue providing the products people depend on at prices they can afford, Massmart needed to increase business efficiencies and reduce costs. By consolidating multiple, disparate IT systems, Massmart would be able to unify and standardize its business processes and IT applications, enabling employees to work more efficiently and make faster decisions to drive process improvements, cost savings, and innovation.

“SAP Signavio and SAP LeanIX solutions allow a holistic view of the application landscape and its true impact on the business. Our solutions now talk to each other. We were able to develop best practices and leverage them as part of our group’s strategy.”

Mark Naidoo, Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Solution Architect, Massmart

The biggest challenge

Multiple, disparate business process and IT landscapes
Lack of transparency and consistency in daily operations
Manual, time-consuming tasks and inefficient allocation of resources

Why SAP

SAP Signavio solutions to provide a single source of truth to align business process and IT landscapes
SAP LeanIX solutions to create a centralized view of the application landscape and its impact on the business
Prepopulated, ready-to-use content in the value accelerator library for SAP Signavio solutions
SAP Signavio Process Explorer solution to enable users to search and explore business capabilities solution maps, and other content within the SAP Signavio Value Accelerators package

“SAP Signavio solutions have provided Massmart with a single, unified business process modeling tool that enables tech business analysts across business functions to collaborate, model, and store their processes within a central repository.”

Mark Naidoo, Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) Solution Architect, Massmart

Building a central repository for processes and IT applications

Massmart’s process and IT landscape was made up of various tools and formats across different business units, leading to a lack of transparency and consistency in daily operations. The company needed a single source of truth to align business processes and IT applications and foster operational excellence.

The integration between SAP Signavio and SAP LeanIX solutions, and a common dictionary of both systems, provide a centralized view of the application landscape and its impact on the business. Massmart is now able to map processes directly to business applications, recognize their value, and identify areas for improvement. Best practices and a new group strategy. The business IT alignment enabled by SAP Signavio and SAP LeanIX solutions provided the building blocks for a rationalization strategy across the technology application landscape. This plays into Massmart’s customer-centric operating model as it allows users to quickly identify and roll out best practices and adapt processes to meet customer needs.

Tech obsolescence risk management

SEFE also uses SAP LeanIX to proactively manage their tech obsolescence risk. The vendor lifecycle information in SAP LeanIX's reference catalog has been particularly helpful in tracking end-of-life software dates and planning accordingly.

In the past, getting lifecycle information for applications and technologies was difficult. SEFE architects often had to use Google to find out when certain versions of software and operating systems hit their end of life (EOL) or no longer had vendor support. There were no regularly scheduled intervals for this research, and it was often performed reactively when something went wrong.

"I really like SAP LeanIX's reference catalog, because we can easily see when a certain technology goes into EOL," said Christmann. "When do we need to start replacing a component? When we started to inventory our applications and gather this type of data in SAP LeanIX, immediately there were notifications to update certain components. There were things the tool told us that we never thought of. So, we were able to uncover many issues just by inputting the data."