Kao USA: Assessing business capability maturity to better align business functions and systems with strategic direction
A new approach in enterprise architecture management
When personal care product powerhouse Kao USA Inc. wanted to understand how well its applications satisfied business requirements, it chose the SAP LeanIX portfolio. Beyond enterprise architecture management, the solutions allowed the company to focus on business capabilities management, helping it better identify high-impact opportunities that deliver optimal strategic value.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Consumer products | Cincinnati, Ohio | >1,200 employees |
months to roll out SAP LeanIX solutions.
applications and 350 capabilities documented and managed.
place to share previously scattered application data.
Enterprise Architect, Kao USA Inc.
Better aligning business capabilities and applications
Guided by the concept of kirei, the Japanese word that describes something that is clean, well-ordered, and beautiful, Kao USA Inc. aims to make life beautiful through its brands, products, technologies, solutions, and services. Operating as a regional unit of Japan-based Kao Corporation, Kao USA has a focus on personal care products—including skin and hair care and cosmetics—and is known for its brands including Jergens, Curél, and KANEBO.
The larger organization is committed to being a role model in a sustainable society and is leading the way in promoting responsible consumption. This includes taking decisive steps to redefine how products are made and consumed.
In an effort to deliver long-term value through enterprise architecture management, Kao USA set about better aligning the organization’s operations, including business functions, processes, and information systems, with its business goals. Despite a strong technical architecture and application inventory, the company uncovered a lack of maturity and structure in business architecture management.
It found there were inconsistent and nonrepeatable conversations being held across departments, with a lack of transparency and discoverability in capability maturity. When it came to process ownership, identifying capability owners was a challenge, as was information accessibility from siloed Microsoft PowerPoint documents that were scattered across systems.
Reimagining business capabilities for future growth
Seeking to lead the way in delivering value from enterprise architecture management in the global corporation, Kao USA made the decision to invest in SAP LeanIX solutions, deploying the software in just two months.
The use of SAP LeanIX would help it gain transparency and control over its IT landscapes by providing a comprehensive view of applications, IT components, and business capabilities.
Intent on documenting how IT supports business functions and identifying areas for improvement, Kao USA sharpened its focus on business capabilities. Using SAP LeanIX, it developed a repeatable, objective assessment framework, complete with capability owner interviews, a scoring matrix across 12 dimensions, visual diagrams, and capability maps.
The company also integrated SAP LeanIX with its knowledge base and project management tools, simplifying access to and consumption of the data. In addition, Kao USA extended the solutions’ meta model by linking capabilities to user groups and processes. It also introduced information objects to track key performance indicators, embedding maturity scores and challenges directly into the fact sheets that are used to record essential details about each architectural object.
Senior Architect, Kao USA Inc.
Creating a repeatable, systematic, and objective approach
Kao USA recognized that the maturity of enterprise architecture management has a significant bearing on delivering business value in everything from improving speed to market and mitigating complexity and risk to achieving technology effectiveness.
Through actionable data-driven insights and AI-enhanced capabilities, SAP LeanIX is supporting Kao USA with value-driven decision-making and collaboration, helping the company better identify high-impact opportunities that deliver optimal strategic value. The solutions do this by capturing information in a way that’s transparent, discoverable, and consumable, and by providing centralized access to capability maturity data for IT and business leaders.
Using the solutions, Kao devised a consistent and repeatable process to evaluate the maturity of business capabilities and categorize them as innovative, differential, or foundational while assessing each capability’s strategic importance. The company established standardized interviews and scoring templates, with its capability maturity assessments now consistent across regions and sectors. In doing so, it enabled cross-regional comparisons and visibility into global challenges. Kevin Gerl, senior architect at Kao USA, says that the solutions allow the company to see common themes across regions: “What once looked like isolated issues, we can now see as global opportunities.”
Senior Architect, Kao USA Inc.
Supporting its global mission with the right technology investments
Using enterprise architecture management to support the strategic agenda, SAP LeanIX has helped Kao USA strengthen the link between business capabilities and strategy and is helping improve its agility in response to market conditions.
While the original scope of the project encompassed 300 applications and 350 capabilities, the systematic and repeatable nature of the framework developed by Kao USA’s team means this approach can be taken globally. In doing so, Kao USA expects to expand the reach of the project to thousands of business applications and capabilities.