How NORMA Group Uncovered Significant Rationalization Potential

NORMA Group is a recognized leader in engineered joining technology solutions, with more than 60 years of manufacturing and product development experience. NORMA Group employs around 8,500 employees across more than 100 countries. Its global network of manufacturing facilities and numerous sales and distribution sites across Europe, the Americas, and Asia-Pacific.

Over the years, NORMA Group has acquired more than 15 companies, with no standard IT integration plan for the IT landscape. Applications became misaligned and redundant. That was until the management board of NORMA Group decided to harmonize business and technology on a global scale, to prepare for further growth.

Application rationalization was the key ingredient to implement this strategy. LeanIX was selected as the single source of truth to gain clear visibility and control of NORMA Group’s IT landscape.

Information stocktake

Previously, NORMA Group loosely monitored their complex application landscape with spreadsheets, which simply fell short in supervising the full spectrum of their extensive IT landscape. A small, central team quickly loaded existing Excel sheets into LeanIX’s platform.

Within a few days, NORMA Group’s management could see the first 350 applications currently in use around the globe. The resulting LeanIX Application Matrix Report displayed applications that supported specific business capabilities by its users (e.g. regions and legal entities). The Application Matrix Report provided the baseline to begin discussing an integrated target application landscape.

Definition of global standards

Once initial transparency was established, the EA team agreed on standard applications for certain business capabilities (e.g. HR operations) with the respective global process owners. NORMA Group subsequently tagged applications with the labels: Tolerate, Obsolete, Outdated, and Target on their LeanIX Application Fact Sheets. Based on this information, the EA team can generate live reports detailing information about which applications are widely used, which applications are unnecessary duplicates, and which applications will be selected as the global standard for a specific capability.

The resulting target Application Landscape report has become such a well-understood baseline that it decorates the office headquarters as a large printout.

Implementation

Six months after the initial stocktake, assessment, and target landscape process was completed, NORMA Group had the tools and information required to formulate a clear roadmap to decommission nonstandard applications and began rolling out the target solutions on a global scale. LeanIX supports the tracking of progress toward the target landscape with roadmaps, lifecycle views, and project Fact Sheets.

The process of application portfolio harmonization is an ongoing process. However, the business case calculated that moving to a standardized global portfolio has uncovered a savings potential worth millions of euros.

One of the big levers to drive the savings has come from reduced level one and level two support by consolidating ERP solutions. NORMA Group credits their quick results to the ease of implementation and use of LeanIX.