SAP LeanIX plays a critical role in enterprise architecture, ERP transformation, and SaaS management at over 1,000 companies. Based on conversations with our customers, IDC has written a report clearly quantifying the value SAP LeanIX delivers.
The International Data Corporation (IDC) is the premier global provider of market intelligence, advisory services, and events for the information technology, telecommunications, and consumer technology markets. We commissioned IDC to quantify the return on investment that companies see, on average, when employing SAP LeanIX software.
IDC interviewed 7 companies that use SAP LeanIX from the USA, Germany, Australia, and Ireland. These organizations represented a range of industries, including software, education, financial services, media, distribution, and retail.
To see what IDC discovered, read the report:
DOWNLOAD: IDC White Paper - The Business Value Of SAP LeanIX
Below you will find some of the report highlights:
SAP LeanIX By The Numbers
IDC found that an investment in SAP LeanIX pays real dividends and that the time to value is remarkably short:
- Average annual benefits per organization: US $1.3 million
- Average annual benefit per SAP LeanIX-managed application: US $2,297
- Standard three-year return on investment: 290%
- Payback period: 5 months
IDC was also able to determine the average increase in productivity and efficiency for different business teams after implementing SAP LeanIX:
- Enterprise architecture: 35% greater efficiency
- Security: 15% greater efficiency
- Compliance: 7% greater productivity
How SAP LeanIX Does It
SAP LeanIX provides a complete, SaaS-based toolset for enterprise architects. It supports you in creating a real-time overview of your business capabilities and the IT landscape supporting them.
This overview facilitates effective application portfolio management, technology risk management, and business transformation management. SAP LeanIX allows you to discover and import IT landscape data, augment that data through surveys of business owners from across the enterprise, and then visualize it in a variety of ways to support strategic decision making.
This enables:
- enhanced collaboration between IT and business teams
- data-driven application portfolio management
- granular insight into your entire enterprise architecture
- business transformation, including application modernization, cloud migration, and ERP transformation
- targeted cost reduction
- enhanced security and regulatory compliance
The SAP LeanIX toolset is comprised of three unique products that support your enterprise architecture function:
1 SAP LeanIX Application Portfolio Management
Our core product, based on our proprietary meta model and grants complete clarity on your enterprise architecture. It enables organizations to inventory architectural elements and their connections, such as applications, platforms, business capabilities, interfaces, and data objects.
2 SAP LeanIX Technology Risk and Compliance
Our newest product supplements Application Portfolio Management with comprehensive risk management capabilities. These include an out-of-the-box integration with ServiceNow to drive IT component discoverability, an IT component lifecycle catalog, and a dashboard for tracking components approaching end-of-life and assessing the associated risk.
3 SAP LeanIX Architecture and Road Map Planning
Expanding on the capabilities of the Application Portfolio Management product, this enables organizations to plan and model their future-state architecture while ensuring consistent documentation of architectural changes. Capabilities include:
- pre-defined transformation templates to standardize modeling changes;
- agile transformation road maps to visualize the planning, prioritization, and progression of initiatives and projects
- comprehensive reports that provide insight into the potential impact of transformations over defined timelines.
Hearing From SAP LeanIX Customers
IDC conducted in-depth interviews with 7 of our customers. These interviews revealed common benefits enjoyed by SAP LeanIX users. These benefits include:
1 Improved Enterprise Architecture Management
From deeper insights into the maturity and morphology of your IT landscape to better intelligence for strategic decisions, our customers describe SAP LeanIX as a tool used to develop and refine their enterprise architecture.
As an education organization explained:
“My organization has gained clarity and transparency from the deployment of SAP LeanIX. We have a better understanding of the technology that is out there, and who is managing it, and the cost and the risks associated with that.”
2 Cost Reduction
Our customers say SAP LeanIX empowers them to cut back on legacy applications as well as improve financial planning and budgeting around application spend.
The SAP LeanIX customer in the education industry told IDC:
“SAP leanIX reduces costs and increases organizational knowledge around core applications. That's the main benefit, so far.”
3 Application Rationalization
Our users find that mapping their application portfolio and resource expenditure to their business capabilities immediately highlights points of overspend. This enables the rationalization of the application portfolio to better fit the needs of the business.
A retail organization explained:
“SAP LeanIX is the indisputable source of truth in our organization. It has given us the ability to defer unnecessary investments, which has a business impact on the bottom line. In addition, when people come to us with a business problem, we can point them to an application, which has contributed to the business’ speed.”
4 Improved Compliance
Gaining better oversight of their IT landscape improved our customers' ability to enforce policies and comply with regulations, they report. Users also told us that this oversight allowed them to better secure their systems and their data.
As was explained by a retailer that subscribes to both SAP LeanIX:
“SAP LeanIX has had a huge impact on security. The technology request process is an all-encompassing process: it forces a check with security, data privacy, and legal. Security will not recognize software that is not in SAP LeanIX, they will call it non-compliant immediately, refuse to service it, and insist that it be registered. They rely heavily on that auditing and checking.”
5 Enhanced Productivity
One less-obvious benefit from the adoption of SAP LeanIX technology was a reported improvement in business productivity. These productivity gains were felt both by departments who need to access IT data as well as end users.
A financial services provider told IDC:
“Our client- facing practices benefit from having just one place to look for the inventory of digital assets. Prior to this, I think we had about twelve different lists of things we have rationalized, and now we have one list.“
Explore The Value Of SAP LeanIX
This is just a snapshot of what our customers have achieved with SAP LeanIX. To learn more, and see what SAP LeanIX could do for you, download the full report:
