Customer Reference__________

Strengthening architectural transparency to drive a successful digital transformation with SAP LeanIX.

Customer Rebuilding a unified knowledge foundation and accelerating complex digital change.

Customer

Virgin Atlantic

Industry

Logistics Services –
Passenger Travel & Leisure

Key technologies

SAP LeanIX

Go-live

xx/xxxx

Country

United
Kingdom

Following the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic, Virgin Atlantic Airways Ltd. and Virgin Atlantic Holidays set out to deliberately rebuild their architecture capability and retain critical knowledge across the business. With SAP LeanIX solutions, the team created a single, trusted view of enterprise, business, and technology architecture. This gave them the clarity needed to understand dependencies, rebuild confidence, and support complex digital transformation in line with their ambition to become the most loved travel company.

600

applications modeled in SAP LeanIX

2-3 days

to produce an architecture diagram,
down from weeks or months

8,000

employees

Rebuilding knowledge and reinforcing the application architecture.

With a vision to be the world’s most loved travel company, Virgin Atlantic Airways Ltd. and Virgin Atlantic Holidays operate as an airline and tour operator within the Virgin Group. The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the technology organization and exposed how vulnerable critical architectural knowledge could be when it wasn’t captured in a consistent, structured way.

As the business rebuilt, the technology function made a deliberate shift in how it approached architecture—focusing on clarity, continuity, and the ability to support meaningful technology change. Retaining knowledge became a priority, particularly as contractors moved in and out of the organization. “Contractors come in, work on tasks, and leave,” says Nick King, head of strategy and architecture at Virgin Atlantic. “Without capturing that knowledge, we’re just running in the dark a lot of the time.”

At the same time, Virgin Atlantic was operating a highly complex technology landscape while delivering a major digital transformation. Supporting both its own and third-party products increased operational complexity. Documentation scattered across multiple tools made it difficult for Virgin Atlantic to understand dependencies, highlight technical debt, or confidently plan its modernization.

Nick King, Head of Strategy and Architecture, Virgin Atlantic Airways Ltd. and Virgin Atlantic Holidays

SAP LeanIX isn’t just an architecture solution—it’s a company-wide enterprise tool, which is a massive benefit.

Streamlining collaboration across enterprise, business, and technology architecture through an intuitive platform.

To support this change, the team deployed SAP LeanIX solutions to break down silos across enterprise, business, and technology architecture and gain a clearer, shared view of dependencies across its change portfolio.

Using SAP LeanIX as a single source of truth, the team can now quickly access the views they need to understand the impact of change. By mapping the future project portfolio against the architecture, Virgin Atlantic is able to see dependencies early, plan more effectively, and manage complexity across projects, environments, and resources.

Improving data quality and consistency was critical to making this insight reliable. The team established clear ownership and governance across key architectural areas, supported by simplified standards and dashboards that highlight where additional attention or guidance is needed. “Quality has been the hardest thing to manage,” says King. “It’s about understanding where people are at and whether they need assistance or training. We created ‘super users’ and shared practical examples so that people could confidently model what they needed and use the platform in their day-to-day work.”

Westernacher Consulting supported the rollout of SAP LeanIX with structured onboarding and a gradual enablement service to ensure the successful adoption of SAP LeanIX. This included a 12-week adoption road map with clearly defined steps and targeted training on the platform, helping the team build confidence quickly and become self-sufficient. “Our partnership with Westernacher was key to the rollout,” King adds. “Once we’d been onboarded, we were able to configure the platform ourselves and create reports and diagrams independently. That ease of use made a huge difference in driving adoption and embedding SAP LeanIX into how we work.”

Nick King, Head of Strategy and Architecture, Virgin Atlantic Airways Ltd. and Virgin Atlantic Holidays

We wanted to build back better after the pandemic by figuring out how to become a more functional architecture team and support the business in the right way.

Harmonizing data and enabling multiple viewpoints.

More than 30 employees now rely on SAP LeanIX regularly, with access being gradually rolled out to increasing numbers of people, including business users and solution architects. Virgin Atlantic is using single sign-on functionality and the optimization service for SAP LeanIX solutions to enable onboarding and training. In 11 months, it has modeled almost 600 applications, producing valuable reports about applications and projects once it reached the 100-application mark. While the company is still in modeling mode, SAP LeanIX has quickly become a single source of truth. King highlights, “SAP LeanIX is delivering a centralized data repository and unprecedented visibility. The fact that we can create so many reports with the solutions is immensely helpful in having discussions with our business teams.”

Virgin Atlantic is embarking on a comprehensive “modern retailing” transformation in line with an industry move away from a core passenger service system (PSS) used by 90% of airlines. With SAP LeanIX, the company can view the PSS and its capabilities, integrations, and impacted applications in terms of business capabilities, organizational structure, and channels. King stresses, “Being able to view the same data in different ways has been critical. It’s allowed us to clearly define the scope of complex change and secure buy-in from the business.”

Similarly, the architecture team can demonstrate the degree of integration complexity to leadership in a simplistic way by using high-level architecture diagrams. These diagrams also support the team in strategic planning by being able to create a dynamic diagram and verify the data in a couple of days. Previously, it would have taken weeks or months to produce a static diagram.

King concludes, “If we update the data, the diagram gets updated, and we can then share this information across the company to show how things are impacted. Gaining visibility across a complex architecture means that we’re more confident about how it looks, what we do with it, how many system integrations we have, and what the data flow is.” The diagrams also help the architecture team plan and understand which applications are used by organizational units at different airports as well as the interdependencies in its future project portfolio.

Nick King, Head of Strategy and Architecture, Virgin Atlantic Airways Ltd. and Virgin Atlantic Holidays

SAP LeanIX gives us real value without unnecessary complexity. People don’t just explore it once and move on—they use it regularly because it’s easy to understand, easy to adopt, and powerful enough to support the work we need to do. That combination is critical for us.

Embracing AI and expanding enterprise architecture capabilities.

Virgin Atlantic plans to use AI across its system architecture and link SAP LeanIX to other data sources so that it can analyze more information and enable better decisions and efficiency. The company has carried out a proof of concept using ChatGPT, with a view to adopting agentic AI to query data and understand situations.

The architecture team has broader ideas around solution designs and assessing those against its current estate. It wants to formalize how it uses SAP LeanIX in the solution architecture space, including managing architecture decisions. While it has mapped out some applications and technologies that were supported and are now technical debt, it intends to actively manage the application lifecycle and technical debt in the future. And once it has the right data and applications modeled, it can also better manage obsolescence and risk. Furthermore, the company would like to adopt other capabilities in SAP LeanIX, such as executive dashboards, presentations, and surveys, while keeping abreast of new documentation and features. Finally, Virgin Atlantic is keen to see how SAP Signavio solutions might support business process modeling as part of its transformation.

Nick King, Head of Strategy and Architecture, Virgin Atlantic Airways Ltd. and Virgin Atlantic Holidays

In every conversation now, someone from the business, architecture, or technology team is eager to explore what else we can do in SAP LeanIX to highlight particular data. It’s crucial in everything we do, and I wouldn’t be without it.

Let's work together. Your path to SAP transformation.

Want to achieve similar success as Virgin Atlantic? Westernacher Consulting supports you in planning and implementing your SAP transformation.

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Strengthening architectural transparency to drive a successful digital transformation with SAP LeanIX.

Customer Rebuilding a unified knowledge foundation and accelerating complex digital change.

Rebuilding knowledge and reinforcing the application architecture.

Streamlining collaboration across enterprise, business, and technology architecture through an intuitive platform.

Harmonizing data and enabling multiple viewpoints.

Embracing AI and expanding enterprise architecture capabilities.

Let's work together. Your path to SAP transformation.

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Strengthening architectural transparency to drive a successful digital transfor­mation with SAP LeanIX.

Customer Rebuilding a unified knowledge foundation and accelerating complex digital change.

Rebuilding knowledge and reinforcing the application architecture.

Streamlining collaboration across enterprise, business, and technology architecture through an intuitive platform.

Harmonizing data and enabling multiple viewpoints.

Embracing AI and expanding enterprise architecture capabilities.

Let's work together. Your path to SAP transformation.

More reference projects.

Quest

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Use of cookies

Westernacher uses cookies to provide you with a more responsive and personalized service. By using this site you agree to our use of cookies. Please read our cookie notice for more information on the cookies we use and how to delete or block them.

Strengthening architectural transparency to drive a successful digital transformation with SAP LeanIX.