C&A: Supporting technology modernization with visibility across the system landscape
Tracking an IT transformation
To stay agile in the face of rapid change in the retail sector, C&A Mode GmbH & Co. KG embarked on a radical IT modernization program. But to manage and track the project effectively, the multinational retail chain needed clarity about both the existing and target IT architecture. It achieved this by deploying SAP LeanIX solutions.
| Industry | Region | Company Size |
| Retail | Vilvoorde, Belgium; and Düsseldorf, Germany | 50,000 employees |
Lead Enterprise Architect, C&A Mode GmbH & Co. KG
Elevating IT to fit a customer-centric retail supply chain
The demands of globalization have led major players in the retail industry to reexamine their relationship with IT. For C&A, a fashion retailer with 1,400 stores and locations in 18 European countries, this meant coming to terms with the impracticality of self-hosting the range of technologies necessary to drive a customer-centric supply chain. With homegrown and internally run applications tied to legacy mainframes and multiple, disparate databases, the existing IT landscape lacked the flexibility to be continually integrated and improved on in an omnichannel future.
To help support its retail ambitions, the company opted for an entirely new IT architecture. This would involve greenfield deployment of more-easily configurable solutions from multiple vendors and replacement of legacy applications by those better suited to demand-driven retail ecosystems. However, a significant question remained: how could the team gain the insights needed to evaluate the existing IT landscape and get clarity about progress on the move to the new target architecture?
Keeping track of a changing IT landscape
To help it effectively control and monitor the IT architecture rebuild, C&A implemented SAP LeanIX. An enterprise architecture (EA) team was responsible for reporting, in data-driven degrees of certainty, to an EA board of company-wide business and IT personnel that met monthly. Alongside the CIO, this cross-organizational board helped the EA team dismantle obstacles to data collection, agree on design principles for vendor and tool selection, and map new technological solutions to processes. In addition, the board developed evaluation criteria around areas such as monolithic or microservices applications, waterfall or agile development, and homegrown or commercial off-the-shelf software.
What’s more, the EA team evolved the existing IT governance framework to provide overviews of IT and business processes. Integration between SAP LeanIX and SAP Signavio solutions enabled the team to perform both architectural analysis and process management while aligning the business with modern retail industry standards. Process flows were first mapped in SAP Signavio. Following that, all interfaces and data flows were mapped in SAP LeanIX. The EA team was then able to consolidate these maps onto a single physical poster displayed for reference in the office.
Accelerating the transformation through faster IT landscape analysis
SAP LeanIX has enabled C&A to quickly get up and running with its IT transformation through rapid analysis of applications, interfaces, and responsibilities. Just three weeks after deployment, C&A migrated all its IT architecture data stored in spreadsheets and flowcharts into the solutions to generate instant and configurable landscape overviews of “as-is” and “to-be” states.
Rapidly becoming a single source of truth for stakeholders across the company, SAP LeanIX provided the transparency required by the EA team to identify and retire redundant software, resulting in significant cost savings. This transparency also helped the team optimize the integration architecture, reducing the total cost of ownership of the target landscape and increasing overall flexibility. Furthermore, C&A now has better awareness of its true technological needs, putting it in a stronger position when negotiating with IT vendors.