Customer success story

Deutsche Bahn enables the whole organization to leverage EA-driven insights with SAP LeanIX

Industry

Transportation

Headquarters

Berlin, Germany

Employees

Almost 300,000

Key highlights

Gained a complete view of their IT landscape and aggregated all application data in a single source of truth
Enabled over 27,000 users to get EA-driven information, reports, and data visualizations
Enhanced decision-making and created tailored dashboards for interaction with the C-level

Deutsche Bahn, headquartered in Berlin, is the national railway company of Germany. Active in over 130 countries and employing over 300,000 people, it is the largest railway company in the world.

The massive transportation company had an existing enterprise architecture (EA) practice, but they needed to scale their EA to keep up with their evolving needs. The more technologies they added and the more they digitized, the more complex their IT landscape became.

In order to obtain buy-in from management for technology initiatives, the IT team needed to present accurate, up-to-date information to management. But a lot of important information was scattered across the organization in siloed spreadsheets and PowerPoint decks.

"We already had enterprise architecture management at Deutsche Bahn, but we needed a more robust EA tool to meet new challenges. We needed to standardize technologies and processes across the organization. We also needed to reduce the number of applications we used and combine technologies to reduce costs. But to achieve this, we needed a complete view of our IT landscape."

Rene Wiecha,
Enterprise Architect, Deutsche Bahn

Full visibility for better decision-making

With SAP LeanIX, Deutsche Bahn was able to achieve a complete view of their IT landscape and aggregate all of their application and technology data in a single, centralized source of truth. This enabled them to see, analyze, and present detailed, accurate proposals and projections to management and other stakeholders.

"For us, the most important benefit of SAP LeanIX is the transparency into our IT landscapes and our business," said Wiecha. "It makes it much easier to determine where we should invest or what needs to be changed. We can see simple visualizations of our full architecture, and not have to sift through outdated PowerPoint slides. We have dashboards where we can easily see our figures and we can sort them by recency and even by the day. And we can create tailored views for the C-level."

Bringing EA-driven insights to the whole organization

SAP LeanIX enables employees across Deutsche Bahn to see valuable data without assistance from enterprise architects or other IT experts. With a single repository and intuitive dashboard, people from different teams across the organization can view the information they need and make their own contributions, enhancing communication and collaboration across the organization.

"We love the usability of SAP LeanIX," said Wiecha. "We started with around 4,000. Now we have about 27,000 users, and we also have non-IT users. The ease of use and self-service features allow people to get information and reports they need, and create their own data visualizations. They can also glean their own unique insights and drive more value for the organization."

On the right track to the future

So far, Deutsche Bahn has been focused on documentation and data visualization, but they plan on leveraging SAP LeanIX for business transformation in the near future. "We want to also use SAP LeanIX to plan future business transformation and track our progress in real time," said Wiecha. "Enterprise architecture cannot be transformative if it's done in a top-down fashion, so we need to work hand-in-hand with the business in order to drive real changes or real transformations. SAP LeanIX allows us to do that."

"SAP LeanIX helps us make better decisions. We can create KPIs and show them in an aggregated view, and provide tailored dashboards with intuitive visualizations for management. It's great that we don't have to rely on spreadsheets and PowerPoint slides anymore."

Rene Wiecha, Enterprise Architect, Deutsche Bahn