What is our primary use case?
I have experience using LeanIX and have generated a report on our platform. I have 2 years of experience with LeanIX. I've worked with clients such as Kendrill, and in my former years with IBM, we used spreadsheets and other applications for enterprise architecture to look at the entire process and architecture infrastructure for all systems. We moved to SAP LeanIX in the past 2 years because one of my clients, Subway, started to use SAP LeanIX as part of their transformational journey.
What is most valuable?
The most valuable features with LeanIX include the ability to define all of the various processes from an enterprise architecture perspective, looking at your infrastructure, looking at your processes, and being able to do the lineage all the way through so that each one of those you can pull them out into their component parts to determine exactly which areas you need to resolve, fix, plan, or build a strategy around.
For SAP LeanIX, we only use it for building the strategy for our enterprise architecture, processes, and the infrastructure for the organization. It was mostly for building a finance system because they were moving to SAP in the first place. We decided to use SAP LeanIX to look at all of their processes, rebuild their processes from the legacy application that they were utilizing, doing the mapping from the old to the new, and then determining where the gaps were, and then building up their various different levels of where the process changes would need to happen.
What needs improvement?
They will continue to improve LeanIX. I'm actually supposed to be at the SAP Sapphire this year. There are a couple of recommendations I know some of my colleagues have made. For me, I have not looked into additional recommendations for LeanIX because I've been held in really just utilizing it for the purposes it has.
One of the things that I know I've had is being able to build it into decent process flows for changes. While LeanIX does have the capability, one of the challenges that I've found, even with working with Subway, was that being able to build that out into a detailed solution for a developer or for new process design was one of the challenges, just making that leap. But there's enough information that comes out of LeanIX to be utilized, and that would be one of the areas I would suggest.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have 2 years of experience with LeanIX.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
The stability of LeanIX, because it's a relatively new product from SAP, even though it was purchased from SAP and then embedded in their suite, if I was to rate it on a scale of 1 to 10, I'd say it's about an eight. We've had issues where we've had to go back to SAP and ask for help with issues that we've had with core capabilities that were supposed to be there but weren't working. We recognized there were things that we needed to tweak or turn on, but that was just because of knowledge base because it was very new to the team. I would never give a 10 out of 10 for any application. It was eight out of 10 because we didn't experience significant issues, but we did have those challenges where we needed to go back to SAP and enter some requests for fixes.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
The scalability of LeanIX is really based on the infrastructure that you have behind it. I've never seen any issues with being able to scale up or scale down the capabilities of the solution at all. The parameters of what we've done, especially for Subway and for Kendrill's clients, we've never seen any issues with the scalability of it. I haven't experienced any scalability issues.
How are customer service and support?
SAP support with LeanIX overall rates around a seven out of 10. That's because of their multiple layers; you have to go to level three, level two, level one. It really is a little bit of a challenge. Sometimes the challenges with the first level that you actually speak to, they don't understand the problem. So, it does take some time to get a resolution. Because I've worked as an SAP liaison in the past when I worked with them on some of their rating technologies for electricity billing, I can navigate that process.
How would you rate customer service and support?
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
The main differences between LeanIX and Sparks are the integrations and capabilities between the ERP platform and the enterprise solution. The challenge that we had with Sparks was that it was quite labor-intensive to be able to get the details into Sparks. The ability to actually integrate that with your ERP solution was not there with Sparks. It's a very powerful tool, it's a really good tool, and I enjoyed using Sparks. With LeanIX, you can use this not only for SAP, but you can use it for integration with APIs with SAP, or back into SAP with LeanIX, that's why LeanIX is the better solution than Sparks.
How was the initial setup?
I was not involved with the initial setup. I was involved with going in once they've already utilized it or installed it.
What about the implementation team?
I help with implementation and that sort of thing.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
I would recommend SAP LeanIX to others because, looking at where I've been coming from, I came from a background where we started to use Visio. From Visio, we went ahead to use spreadsheets. From spreadsheets and Visio, we moved into Sparks. From Sparks, we moved into SAP LeanIX. From that perspective, my career evolved to LeanIX. I'm sure there will be better solutions eventually, but as it stands now, I'm very comfortable with SAP LeanIX.
What other advice do I have?
When I talk about the infrastructure piece, one of the things that we looked at moving from the old technologies, for example, from their old database technologies to the new, we recognized they had a lot of tech debt. Old systems needed to be retired because old database technologies would not work with the new SAP backend database.
Looking at their cloud infrastructure that they were building to recognize that they had AWS and Azure, which didn't make sense. We actually recommended looking at all of these licensing, looking at the performance, scaling of the environment, and then making recommendations, basically using SAP LeanIX to decide which path they should take.
I was not involved with the pricing because I was not involved with deciding for the implementation of SAP LeanIX. I went in to use LeanIX as an enterprise architect to help them out. I do know SAP licensing from an ERP standpoint, but I cannot speak to SAP LeanIX pricing.
I have individuals at SAP that I can reach out to directly and have them push our tickets to get them resolved. I'm not a designated partner of SAP. Because of my relationship with SAP, I have quite a few contacts there. Whenever SAP has contracts that are smaller in nature, they provide it to my group. My group has a consortium of consultants, some of those who have worked in some of the big five, who work alongside me through my company, and we provide solutions to our clients.
I would rate LeanIX at an 8.5, trending towards nine.
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
Hybrid Cloud
If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?
Other
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer. Implementer