Travis Perkins: Modernizing IT with enterprise architecture and business process transformation
Building more sustainable IT operations
Travis Perkins used SAP LeanIX solutions to gain a comprehensive overview of its IT and business process landscape. The builders’ merchant and home improvement retailer now has reliable insights into process ownership, a shared resource providing access to critical IT and process data, and standards that support innovation and transformation.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Retail | Northampton, United Kingdom | >25,000 employees |
Enterprise Architect, Travis Perkins plc
Auditing architecture and modernizing IT
Several years ago, Travis Perkins plc, a British builders’ merchant and home improvement retailer based in Northampton, decided to sell off its plumbing and heating division. In the run-up to that divestiture, IT leadership at Travis Perkins wanted an audit of the division’s IT landscape. Travis Perkins worked with a partner, Cognizant, to conduct a baseline architecture assessment of plumbing and heating. The tool Cognizant chose for that process was SAP LeanIX solutions.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the divestiture process hit a pause, but a larger project had arisen. As a company consisting of many sub-brands, Travis Perkins relied on a complex IT landscape that had grown organically for many years. This organic evolution meant, according to Matt Webb, the company’s head of business process improvement, that the IT landscape was “not how you would have built it” had it been planned from the outset. The company recognized that customer behavior was changing. It needed to focus on improving the user experience and catching up with evolving customer expectations. Unfortunately, the existing IT landscape could not support this.
Travis Perkins needed to modernize IT systems not just to better serve customers but also to optimize operational efficiency. Due to the risk that outdated systems posed in the realm of finance, modernizing financial systems presented Travis Perkins with a good starting point. To this end, the goal was setting finance on a firm foundation for the future, a foundation that would provide consistency and control, especially over data.
Modernizing IT systems at a company can be challenging. At Travis Perkins, much of the information needed to plan and execute the modernization process was missing or poorly maintained. So that’s the challenge it set out to address first.
Collecting, mapping, and modeling data
As David Crooks, enterprise architect at Travis Perkins, explains, the work of “getting everything in one place” had already begun with the plumbing and heating project.
“The finance and other back-end systems we cataloged for plumbing and heating were actually a clone of what Travis Perkins used as our main ERP platform. What’s more, of the 280 or so core applications used by plumbing and heating, something like 260 or 270 were shared with Travis Perkins. So, we had already done a lot of the heavy lifting before embarking on the wider project.”
SAP LeanIX solutions thus served as the system of record for the organization’s diverse IT assets. This enabled standardization—including creating a common understanding of what different components were called—but also provided transparency around users and ownership. To achieve the same level of standardization on the process front, Travis Perkins needed to change how it had done things historically.
“We had used diagramming tools for process modeling in the past,” Webb says, “which creates a nice picture, but it’s just a picture. We wanted a model with the data underpinning it—telling us, for example, who owned what applications—so we could do some proper analysis.”
The close integration of SAP LeanIX and SAP Signavio solutions gave Travis Perkins a unified view of its IT and process landscapes, based on a shared pool of data, to support the analysis requirements.
As part of an earlier ERP transformation project, Webb and his team had already created diagrams of all the processes involved. They also created a spreadsheet with 45,000 cells containing all the relevant data for these diagrams. While this allowed others to analyze the data, it meant a lot of extra effort went into maintaining two separate sources of truth.
To solve this problem, Travis Perkins turned to SAP Signavio solutions to house process models and process data in the same location. And since SAP LeanIX solutions already featured close integrations with SAP Signavio solutions, the company could intuitively supplement process data with enterprise architecture data. As a result, users could quickly understand not only which applications were used in which process but also who owned and used these applications.
The combination of SAP LeanIX and SAP Signavio solutions also allowed Travis Perkins to map technology and processes to business capabilities. Thanks to the sheer number of brands under the Travis Perkins umbrella, the business capability map at Travis Perkins is incredibly complex. The good news is that by “triangulating,” as Webb puts it, Travis Perkins can now make sense of the connections between business capabilities, technology, and processes. It can also simplify these connections where possible and build on a foundation of data it trusts.
Of course, settling on a process modeling tool was just the first step. As it turned out, information about processes at Travis Perkins was fragmented. So, Webb and his team set about doing process discovery, running workshops with business stakeholders to map out processes. This involved understanding not only processes at a base level but also the wider scope of each process in terms of a broader ecosystem of processes, applications, and data sources feeding into it.
This process itself was very revealing because it highlighted where there were “black boxes” in existing processes—places where business stakeholders themselves didn’t completely understand where data came from or went to.
Ultimately, by establishing a system of record around process, technology, and business capabilities, Travis Perkins made true IT modernization actionable.
Powering sustainable IT and meeting customers’ expectations
While the modernization project is ongoing, Travis Perkins already has several successes under its belt.
First, it has a good understanding of the as-is state of the IT and process landscape. It has a place, as Crooks describes it, where people can “go to find things,” such as who owns a particular process, how that process relates to other processes, and what applications support that process. This did not exist before and now serves as a resource for the entire organization.
Second, it has begun to implement standards covering how process and IT data is collected and stored as well as what processes should look like. This kind of standardization is key for innovation. As Webb explains, “Travis Perkins has always encouraged its sub-brands to operate independently. If you have 600 branches doing 600 different things in different ways, that’s a recipe for chaos. If those 600 branches can rely on the same underlying systems and focus their energies where it matters, you have a recipe for innovation.”
Finally, these efforts have brought a new level of confidence to the organization when it comes to transformation. Travis Perkins uses a homegrown ERP system built up over several decades. A few years ago, an unsuccessful initiative was undertaken to rearchitect and replace this system. Thanks to the work of Webb, Crooks, and their respective teams, the organization now has the pieces in place to plan and execute transformations in a consistent, standardized way. Since Travis Perkins, as with all other organizations, will need to continuously transform into the future, such new-found confidence is invaluable.