Hapag-Lloyd: From complexity to big picture: Enterprise architecture enabling digital transformation
Connecting strategy, architecture, and customer experience
At Hapag-Lloyd AG, a leading global shipping company, enterprise architecture supported by SAP solutions delivers the big picture that drives digital transformation. As a collaborative tool, SAP LeanIX solutions act as an enabler for a long-term ambition to embed architectural thinking across roles and domains. The company can align IT and digital initiatives not only with its business needs but also with customer expectations.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Travel and transportation | Hamburg, Germany | 15,200 employees |
enterprise architecture use cases implemented in one year.
monthly unique users of SAP LeanIX.
active members of the enterprise architecture community.
Head of Enterprise Architecture Management, Hapag-Lloyd AG
Creating architectural clarity as a strategic enabler
With a fleet of 302 modern container ships and a total transport capacity of 2.5 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs), Hapag-Lloyd is one of the world’s leading liner shipping companies. In the liner shipping segment, the company has 15,200 employees and 400 offices in 140 countries. It has a container capacity of 3.6 million TEUs—including one of the largest and most modern fleets of reefer containers. A total of 133 liner services worldwide ensure fast and reliable connections between 600 ports on all continents. In the terminal and infrastructure segment, Hapag-Lloyd has equity stakes in 24 marine terminals in Europe, Latin America, the United States, India, and North Africa. A total of 4,400 employees are assigned to this segment, providing complementary logistics services at selected locations in addition to terminal activities.
At Hapag-Lloyd, architectural clarity based on SAP LeanIX solutions aims to empower distributed teams operating from three central IT locations and serving users worldwide to make faster and smarter decisions. This clarity underpins transformation efforts, such as replacing its mainframe and managing a continuous feature pipeline.
In a fast-paced global business, connectedness is key to staying agile and resilient. This is especially critical in areas of tension like the transition from SAP ERP Central Component (SAP ECC) to SAP S/4HANA, where migration and new feature development must coexist. Beyond that, global rollouts and migration plans, such as the company’s HR-tool landscape unification, demand a clear architectural vision. These are just some of the many initiatives where clarity—enabled by SAP LeanIX—drives success.
Director IT—Architecture, Hapag-Lloyd AG
Enabling tangible transformation with enterprise architecture services
To turn its vision into reality, Hapag-Lloyd introduced a suite of enterprise architecture services in SAP LeanIX solutions, making its transformation tangible and connected. These services lay the foundation for clarity and agility across the company’s global IT landscape. Capabilities include linking customer touchpoints to enterprise architecture to support quality promises and aligning IT solutions with strategic objectives and customer perspectives through business capability modeling. Hapag-Lloyd uses application business landscape mapping to identify redundancies and streamline its portfolio as well as a software catalog that provides global access to approved tools, reducing overhead in procurement and IT service calls. Data flow visualization helps the business understand how data moves across its systems—with a target to put data at the center of decision-making. And road maps and application landscapes support major programs in HR, finance, and ERP systems with clear architectural guidance.
As part of its “fast4ward” program, the finance organization at Hapag-Lloyd is undergoing a comprehensive business transformation that includes implementing SAP S/4HANA to modernize processes, improve efficiency, and unlock new capabilities. To support this journey, the enterprise architecture team uses the business capability landscape, built with SAP LeanIX, as a strategic tool for planning and execution. The landscape connects finance capabilities, processes, data, IT systems, and ownership into a unified view, creating transparency across finance business areas. It allows scoping and solution mapping from a business perspective so that Hapag-Lloyd can maximize return on investment in using functionalities in SAP S/4HANA.
The Business Transformation and Architecture team from SAP supported the initiative by defining a comprehensive finance capability model and mapping it to the corresponding instances of SAP S/4HANA. This created a business-driven blueprint that linked processes, data, and systems, helping ensure that the finance transformation could leverage the full potential of SAP S/4HANA. Providing this transparency enabled Hapag-Lloyd to make informed decisions and accelerate value realization in its fast4ward program.
With “Strategy 2030,” Hapag-Lloyd aims to deliver exceptional customer experiences by aligning operations with customer expectations. Customer journey insights enabled with enterprise architecture allow the company to view its operations through its customers’ eyes. Mapping the customer journey, including all touchpoints, reveals which business processes and services (technology) are involved in delivering each experience. The direct linkage between customer experience, processes, services, applications, and data flows means that the company can assess and improve solution quality. Embedding service-level agreements (SLAs) and nonfunctional requirements (NFRs) will help Hapag-Lloyd ensure its applications meet business needs and support customer-centric enhancements aligned with its strategy.
The largest part of Hapag-Lloyd’s transformation focused on replacing its mainframe and migrating its central ERP to the cloud, which was critical for its future operations. The company uses the mainframe shutdown application road map to create a migration road map for the mainframe transformation, showing the architectural impact and cost of so-called “application components.” This supports product teams to analyze, plan, and communicate migration activities, identify quick wins, prioritize shutdowns, and implement the target architecture step-by-step.
Hapag-Lloyd also took advantage of the data flow and ownership transparency service to promote visibility across IT products, business data, and process dependencies. This allowed it to reduce redundant work and content in local product documentation and to accelerate transformation. This service provided a cross-system view of data flows among products, modules, and applications, supported by a decentralized content maintenance process to help ensure consistent, high-quality updates and coordinate feature delivery in distributed teams. These latter two enterprise architecture services in SAP LeanIX drive transparency, prioritization, and actionable insights so that progress can be structured, measurable, and aligned with strategic goals.
Senior Director Digital Transformation Finance, Hapag-Lloyd AG
Providing transparency and context for better decision-making
Using the business capability landscape allowed Hapag-Lloyd to organize and cluster artifacts in a functional rather than technical way, shifting discussions from applications and technology toward outcomes that drive business goals. The short-term benefits of the company’s fast4ward program include detailed mapping of its finance functions to its current architecture and potential functionality in SAP S/4HANA aligned with existing and future SAP software investments. It also provides a leading business application map to help ensure collaboration with ERP platform teams for shared business capability ownership across platforms. For the longer term, Hapag-Lloyd has established a comprehensive finance capability map with enhanced visibility into responsibilities, technology, and processes in a language understood by both business and IT. It serves as a foundation for a more structured and transparent approach to transforming the finance domain. Hapag-Lloyd has produced a clear architecture blueprint that accelerates its transformation, optimizes processes, and strengthens alignment between business and IT.
The customer journey insights service delivers a customer-centric perspective, enabling Hapag-Lloyd to view operations from the customer’s viewpoint by mapping their journey and experiences. Linking each customer touchpoint to business processes and services creates clarity on execution. Using technology and data integration, the company can connect business services to applications and data flows, allowing it to assess and improve solution quality. Strategic alignment embeds SLAs and NFRs to help ensure that applications support its business needs and align with Strategy 2030 to pay into its quality promises. And it can gain actionable insights from customer feedback to analyze, prioritize, and drive improvements across its processes and services. Using customer journey insights gives Hapag-Lloyd a holistic view of the customer experience that empowers it to identify improvement opportunities, prioritize initiatives, and maintain alignment between business and IT. The company can now put the customer truly at the center of its transformation.
With SAP LeanIX supporting its enterprise architecture platform, Hapag-Lloyd has established a central foundation for strengthening and maturing its enterprise architecture capabilities. From business and data architecture to IT transformation planning, architecture governance, IT portfolio optimization, and cloud architecture, SAP LeanIX plays a pivotal role in connecting disciplines. And it enables a holistic approach by providing the big picture across business and IT.
Within a year, the company successfully implemented 26 enterprise architecture use cases on the platform, creating tangible benefits across enterprise architecture capabilities and both business and IT domains. SAP LeanIX is now used by 680 unique monthly users and supported by a growing global enterprise architecture community of more than 490 active members.
The platform’s diverse capabilities foster architectural thinking across the roles involved in digital transformation. By integrating best-practice tools, architecture content, and common architecture processes, SAP LeanIX helps turn enterprise architecture into measurable value—driving transparency, alignment, and sustainable impact for Hapag-Lloyd. At the same time, its intuitive design and outstanding user experience are key to user adoption—empowering teams to navigate complexity with ease and making even the most complex architectural landscapes appear simplified and actionable.
With an embedded enterprise architecture across business and IT, Hapag-Lloyd is strengthening a more connected and scalable foundation for its ongoing transformation journey.
Head of Enterprise Architecture Management, Hapag-Lloyd AG