American Fortune 500 retail corporation achieves supply chain platform consolidation, aligning multiple teams with a holistic view of business and technology scope

Background

A Fortune 100 American multinational retail corporation generating more than $150B in revenue annually. They have been in business for over 40 years and are proud to have more than 190,000 employees driving their business forward.

The Task

Align multiple teams with a holistic view of business and technology scope empowering faster processing of architecture decisions through a singular retail consolidation solution.

Challenges

• A complex platform consolidation initiative requiring executive decisions on the core architecture approach.
• Multiple workstreams-involving separate architect teams and perspectives on the problem-required reconciliation to progress key planning decisions.
• Absence of a shared representation of the business scope and technology landscape that could form the basis of recommendations to leadership.

Solution

A reference architecture was built with Capsifi and used as a key input to workstream reconciliation workshops. Interconnected application and a retail business capability model was modelled, with data categorizations on the elements allowing the identification of high criticality business areas. The business architecture framework was refined in real-time during workshops to reflect decisions made. Visualizations of the model were updated dynamically. The model drove the agreement of enterprise architecture recommendations.

Outcome

A holistic view of the retail company business and technology scope enabling multi-team alignment and the accelerated progressing of architecture decisions. An easily maintainable model of the technology landscape with inherent linkages to business architecture and project portfolio domains.

Winning features

• Retail Business Capability Maps
• Value Streams
• System to application and application to capability heatmaps
• Application Roadmaps