Pemex Deer Park: Integrating enterprise architecture and process intelligence as a transformation starting point
A scalable blueprint for long-term agility
Pemex Deer Park Refinery, owned by oil and gas giant Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex), adopted the SAP LeanIX portfolio and SAP Signavio solutions as a starting point in its planned transformation to SAP Cloud ERP Private capabilities. The solutions help align business and IT, map out current and future-state architectures, and provide visibility into complex IT and process landscapes.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Oil, gas, and energy | Houston, Texas | 1,000 employees |
of legacy applications identified for removal or migration.
visibility into enterprise architecture.
Enterprise Architect, Pemex Deer Park Refinery
Aligning modern technology to its transformation needs
Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex) is Mexico’s largest company and wholly owned by the government of Mexico. It is one of the few oil companies in the world that works across the entire production chain, from exploration to the distribution and marketing of finished products, including petrochemicals.
Its oil refinery, Pemex Deer Park Refinery, located on the Houston Ship Channel in Texas, processes 275,000 barrels of crude oil every day from various countries, including Mexico, the United States, and Canada. Established in 1929, the refinery at Deer Park was formerly a joint venture with Royal Dutch Shell PLC. Pemex took full ownership in 2022.
The rich history of the refinery came, however, with aging infrastructure and legacy systems that impinged on agility and innovation. Siloed communication between IT teams and business units and a lack of visibility into IT assets and business processes meant that decision-making was based on urgency rather than strategic priorities. Needing to transform its IT architecture for future scalability, Pemex Deer Park sought the right tools to help it prepare for a large-scale transformation.
Creating a centralized repository for business processes and architecture
Pemex Deer Park made the decision to transform its business landscape by migrating from its legacy ERP application to SAP Cloud ERP Private capabilities using a greenfield migration approach. To guide the journey, it adopted the SAP LeanIX portfolio integrated with SAP Signavio solutions. The tools would help it line up business and IT thinking, map out current and future-state architectures, and provide visibility into complex IT and process landscapes.
With SAP LeanIX, Pemex Deer Park could align enterprise architecture with business strategy while ingesting information from a third-party system used to manage technical architecture. The use of SAP LeanIX would also enable the creation of a business capability map and other strategic road maps.
With SAP Signavio solutions, Pemex Deer Park could better understand and optimize the use of its current ERP landscape and provide visibility into actual versus perceived process execution and variances. This was critical for maximizing the process design for SAP Cloud ERP Private as well as providing a centralized repository for business process diagrams for both SAP and third-party processes.
As a first move, Pemex Deer Park involved the executive team and identified business and IT process owners. The company then conducted workshops with these owners to make an inventory of its applications and core systems and understand how well these systems and applications met specific needs. All this data was captured in SAP LeanIX.
Enterprise Architect, Pemex Deer Park Refinery
Shifting to a mindset of foundational excellence over tool proliferation
Albert Flores, enterprise architect at Pemex Deer Park, thinks that establishing IT and business ownership accountability has had a positive influence on company dynamics. He can also see a significant change in its understanding of its enterprise architecture. He says, “With SAP LeanIX, we actually know what applications we have right now. This is a huge improvement from previously referring to spreadsheets listing applications we thought we had.”
Using information collected in SAP LeanIX as a base, Pemex Deer Park applied a Gartner TIME model as a framework to evaluate its applications by quality and maintainability as well as by functional fit. This allowed it to determine the future of each of its applications, with the company earmarking 31% of its applications as candidates for elimination or migration.
A significant outcome of this process was the creation of a three-year technology road map that’s designed to evolve continuously and helps the company align project funding with strategic priorities.
In terms of business process transformation and planning for its greenfield migration, the company is using SAP Signavio to understand its current processes to help ensure its new process design reflects its requirements.
Enterprise Architect, Pemex Deer Park Refinery
Exploring future AI and process automation transformation
In line with its road map and architecture, which are designed to evolve continuously, the company is looking to visualize this information for middle management through real-time dashboards. It is also establishing a feedback loop with business owners, using surveys in SAP LeanIX to validate evolving needs.
Pemex Deer Park is already using SAP Signavio to build a repository of business process diagrams related to SAP Cloud ERP Private. In parallel, thanks to centralized process data in SAP Signavio, the company is planning for future process automation and AI initiatives once its operations have stabilized on the advanced ERP.
The company is also planning to monitor business process performance using the SAP Signavio Process Intelligence solution.