Dura Vermeer: Building for the future by elevating enterprise architecture management
Gaining control over a massive IT landscape
Dura Vermeer is a leading Dutch construction firm that includes more than 20 independent regional entities. To gain transparency into its vast IT landscape and better align the firm’s IT infrastructure with its strategic goals, the company deployed SAP LeanIX solutions.
| Industry | Region | Company Size | Partner |
| Construction and real estate | Rotterdam, Netherlands | 3,300 employees | Flexso |
reduction in project preparation time.
consolidation of project IT lists.
fewer PDF viewers and editors in use.
Enterprise Architect, Dura Vermeer
Modernizing a decentralized IT architecture
Dura Vermeer is a €2.1 billion company that provides residential and nonresidential construction, infrastructure, engineering, and technical installation in the Netherlands. With more than 20 independent regional operating entities, Dura Vermeer offers a regional presence along with the knowledge, strength, and resources of a national enterprise. Founded in 1855, the independent family business designs, develops, and implements construction and infrastructure projects, with a goal of building a world in which both current and future generations can live and work.
Dura Vermeer’s decentralized organizational structure created challenges for its IT infrastructure. Fragmented application documentation made it difficult to determine which software was deployed and how it was used. Employees struggled to identify application owners, delaying or blocking new IT transformation projects. Each Dura Vermeer company had its own IT architecture and application portfolio management experts who created their own spreadsheets of IT projects, which often duplicated projects planned by other teams.
This decentralized IT architecture function resulted in knowledge silos across the organization, especially among information managers, solution architects, and information management leaders. Application management processes were often inconsistent from group to group. Architects struggled to find peers who could help them address challenges, creating frustration and high turnover.
Enterprise Architect, Dura Vermeer
Deploying SAP LeanIX to support IT transformation
To address these challenges, Dura Vermeer wanted to centralize and upgrade its enterprise architecture management. Key requirements included modern technology that matched the functional requirements identified by a team of stakeholders from the business and IT. Another priority was to choose providers with a presence in the Netherlands and team members who could speak Dutch. Finally, the company wanted to make sure that the solution would fit its current working processes.
Dura Vermeer chose SAP LeanIX solutions to meet its enterprise architecture transformation needs. It began deploying the software in 2024, beginning with onboarding and user demos. A six-week training program introduced architects and the application management team to the solutions. Ongoing training is helping users learn to manage the IT portfolio with SAP LeanIX. Internal champions helped drive the success of the project, leading to more widespread adoption of the transformation solutions.
The company engaged with Flexso, an SAP gold partner, to train additional users and ensure its deployment goals were met on schedule. Flexso also offered implementation expertise gleaned from other deployment projects, including demos that helped business users better understand the need for application lifecycle management.
Dura Vermeer appreciates the rich functionality and data-focused approach to enterprise architecture management in SAP LeanIX. “The data-first features help ensure we have the application information we need while supporting our quality monitoring,” says Simone Jeurissen, enterprise architect at Dura Vermeer. “The diagramming functionality within SAP LeanIX offered a soft landing for IT architects.”
Road map planning capabilities help the IT transformation team manage the project portfolio and create detailed quarterly project plans. Survey functionality helps the company collect application and owner information and ask detailed questions at the start of each new initiative, saving time and effort. “Instead of working with different spreadsheets, we’ve centralized our road map planning in SAP LeanIX,” says Jeurissen. “As we focus more on application portfolio management, we have created a customized survey to collect information from product owners about each application’s functional and technical fit.”
In an early workshop, the team used SAP LeanIX to support application rationalization. The centralized view of the enterprise landscape helped Dura Vermeer identify 15 PDF viewers and editors being used throughout the organization. After reviewing the functionality of each application and surveying user preferences, the company was able to eliminate all but four of the products.
Enterprise Architect, Dura Vermeer
Improving visibility and actionable insight
SAP LeanIX solutions helped Dura Vermeer achieve value in several important ways. By centralizing transformation management, the company was able to speed up the discovery phase of IT projects. The exploration phase, in which the project team identified application owners, decreased from three months to two weeks. With more visibility into projects, the ability to find information faster than before, and greater integration between SAP LeanIX and other applications, the company significantly reduced the cost of transformation projects.
The SAP solutions also offer useful insights. By better understanding which applications are being used, the enterprise architecture team can discuss the best governance structure with application and product owners, helping the company maintain applications that fit its needs.
Because it offers insights on the lifecycles of both applications and underlying IT components, the road map functionality helps Dura Vermeer improve IT planning. “We can define work much earlier and we can plan proactively, which is a great improvement,” says Jeurissen. “Stakeholder collaboration is better than ever with IT architects, our architecture teams, and our development teams—including lead developers and product owners—working together on one knowledge base.”
Her advice to companies considering using enterprise architecture management software is clear: don’t underestimate the importance of culture, change, and adoption in IT transformation projects. “You need to take people along to make sure they understand why you’re implementing the solutions and what they’ll gain by contributing to the initiative,” says Jeurissen. “Even though SAP LeanIX is a very user-friendly tool, you need to dedicate resources to training and change management to help ensure a successful implementation.”
Enterprise Architect, Dura Vermeer
Navigating ongoing enterprise transformation
Looking ahead, Dura Vermeer plans to continue exploring the application portfolio management functionality of SAP LeanIX. The team is collecting user feedback that will support future discussions about application rationalization, especially for the company’s three ERP systems.
Another plan is to use SAP solutions to identify applications needed to report on the organization’s sustainability goals. “It’s easy to build new applications that create data and report on that,” explains Jeurissen. “But from an IT sustainability perspective, that’s not where we want to be. We want to integrate sustainability into our primary processes, and we think SAP LeanIX can help.”
As the company begins to explore using AI, especially agentic AI, Dura Vermeer expects to use SAP LeanIX to balance users’ freedom to experiment with proven application management practices. “We’re creating a collaborative, shared environment to let people try out AI,” says Jeurissen. “But as soon as an agent becomes widely used or needs to process sensitive information, we’ll use SAP LeanIX to register it and make sure we’re compliant with the European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act.”
In the next two years, the company plans to incorporate enterprise architecture practices into its development processes. SAP LeanIX can help create work instructions that teams can use to build sustainable architectures on their own. Within five years, Jeurissen hopes business users and citizen developers in Dura Vermeer’s independent companies will be able to use the solutions to create innovative new solutions without large resource expenditures from IT.
“SAP LeanIX is central to realizing our long-term enterprise architectural vision,” says Jeurissen. “Of course we’re using the solutions to document our IT landscape. But we’re also expanding that to include our vision and our architectural guidelines. The solutions will play a critical role in automating our enterprise architecture management processes and centrally managing transformations.”
Featured partner
Flexso is an SAP gold partner that works with customers to build solutions that pave the way for smooth digital transformation. As a strategic end-to-end partner for the implementation of SAP solutions, Flexso helps companies get the most from their SAP investment. By working as an extension of each company’s IT team, Flexso helps make customers’ innovation road map a reality.