Customer Success Story

Energy company SEFE drives business transformation and energy transition with SAP LeanIX

Industry

Energy and utilities

Headquarters

Berlin, Germany

Employees

2,000

Result

Performed a comprehensive application rationalization, eliminating many duplicate apps and significantly reducing costs and complexity
Created a self-service model for architecture data queries and requests
Used SAP LeanIX fact sheets as a foundation to define a new IT strategy and optimize business decisions
Gained insights into their tech obsolescence risk by using the available data in the reference catalogue
Leveraging SAP LeanIX for the visibility, road-mapping, and change management necessary for the transition to greener products

SEFE, an international energy company, ensures secure energy supplies and drives decarbonization for its customers. SEFE’s activities span the energy value chain, from origination and trading to sales, transport and storage. Through its decades-long expertise in trading and the development of its LNG business, SEFE has become one of the most important suppliers to industrial customers in Europe, with an annual sales volume of 200 TWh of gas and power. Its 50,000 customers range from small businesses to municipalities and multinational organizations. By investing in clean energy, especially in the hydrogen ecosystem, SEFE is contributing to the energy transition. The company employs around 2,000 people globally and is owned by the Federal Government of Germany.

Currently, SEFE is undertaking an initiative to integrate and harmonize the various IT teams across the company. They're also standardizing processes and introducing tools to manage those standards throughout the entire organization. To accomplish these ambitious goals, SEFE is revamping its enterprise architecture (EA) practices to fit their new organizational model.

"When I joined the CIO office, each individual unit had their own separate architecture teams operating mostly in isolation," said Stefan Christmann, SEFE Vice President of IT Strategy, Enterprise Architecture and Data Governance. "We gathered all the architects across all organizations, and we examined our tool stacks. We had an aging central EA repository that was not maintained, and the data within it was siloed. We needed to recreate this entire data set, and we decided SAP LeanIX would be the best tool for our purposes."

SEFE began their journey with SAP LeanIX by undergoing a four-month onboarding process with SAP LeanIX Professional Services.

"When we first partnered with SAP LeanIX, I assumed we would tell them our requirements, and then they would go back and customize the system for us to use the tool. But that's not the way it worked," Christmann recalled. "They educated us on how to do it ourselves. Now, all the architects know how to use the system, what it can do, the opportunities it presents, and how to customize it. There's a lot of flexibility, which gives us the confidence that we can build out any use case we need inside the tool."

"An unexpected benefit is that the SAP LeanIX community is so helpful, and the development of the product is so proactive. I also like to be involved in its development. Being able to raise feature requests and vote on them is something you don't see in many software products. This transparency is something I've never seen before."

Dr. Stefan Christmann,
Vice President of IT Strategy, Enterprise Architecture and Data Governance, SEFE

Full visibility and self-service make everyone’s life easier

The first thing SEFE did in SAP LeanIX was create a complete overview of their entire application portfolio, including all siloed business units. They then performed an application rationalization to eliminate duplicate apps and reduce operational complexity.

"We can now see all of our applications and interfaces, but we're also mapping these application systems to business capabilities," said Christmann. "That has uncovered many duplicate and redundant applications.”

Not only did they gain full visibility of their IT estate and create a comprehensive inventory of all their applications, but they made that information available to everyone in SAP LeanIX. Architects, business analysts, C-suite executives, parts of operations teams, and people in other roles can access the data they need, when they need it.

Before using SAP LeanIX, every time a new SEFE employee wanted to access the EA repository, it would take two or three days to get all the necessary approvals. It also required installing two different applications on a device and undergoing training on how to use them.

Now, with SAP LeanIX, relevant people in the SEFE organization can easily access any IT information they need. The data is available in a single place and the architecture team in particular has benefited from SAP LeanIX by shifting inbound requests to a self-service model.

"The team used to receive many queries about applications, software products, vendors, and so on," explained Christmann. "That's all self-service now. So, SAP LeanIX freed up a lot of time for our architects, which they can redirect to more valuable tasks."

Defining the IT strategy

SEFE is leveraging the data in SAP LeanIX to define their overall IT strategy and optimize decision-making. As Christmann explained, "With SAP LeanIX, we can answer important questions based on data. You need the details to develop the best strategies, and the dashboarding in SAP LeanIX is especially helpful for that.”

“If I'm working with a business analyst or an architect, I always pull out the SAP LeanIX fact sheet and discuss the data within it. It gives everyone a common understanding of the context. When we were looking at options for cloud migrations, such as multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, etc., the data inside SAP LeanIX was fundamental to our decision-making. If we didn't have SAP LeanIX in place, the quality of our decision-making process would have been poor, because nobody would have had an overview of where we were at the time.”

Christmann went on to explain that SEFE's long-term goal is to base all of EA activities on SAP LeanIX data. "We still sometimes have to add some Confluence pages to it, but it's quickly becoming the core of our EA processes."

"One thing I enjoy about SAP LeanIX is that they stay on top of what the market needs. They ask CIOs about their challenges, then act on that knowledge.
The AI governance feature comes to mind.
By the time we realized that we would need it, SAP LeanIX was already close to releasing it."

Dr. Stefan Christmann, Vice President of IT Strategy, Enterprise Architecture and Data Governance, SEFE

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."

The future looks greener with SAP LeanIX

SEFE has ambitious plans for the future. They understand that to stay ahead of changing technologies, markets, and customer expectations, continuous IT and business transformation must be part of their organization’s DNA. And they plan on making SAP LeanIX a key pillar of their continuous transformation strategy. One of SEFE’s biggest and most important long-term goals is to be a driving force in the transition from fossil fuels to green energy.

"I think SAP LeanIX will be very helpful in accelerating our transition," Christmann said. "We will need a complete overview and understanding of all our processes and how they are supported by IT. This visibility will be extremely powerful, and important for our change management."