A global manufacturing and technology business – whose products include a consumer-facing app used by customers to control and monitor their heating systems – had lost visibility of its own technology estate. EC audited everything from core SAP ERP systems to untracked desktop spreadsheets, surfacing security risks, redundancies, and process inefficiencies, and delivered the architectural clarity needed to underpin a credible application and data strategy.
The challenge:
Years of organic growth had left the business with a technology estate that no one fully understood. Systems had accumulated across divisions with limited central oversight, critical tools were running on ageing or obsolete components, and there was no reliable picture of how data moved across the organisation or where duplication was creating unnecessary risk and cost.
Our approach:
We interviewed the owners of software systems across the business — from enterprise ERP infrastructure down to individual spreadsheets performing critical functions — assessing whether each system’s capability matched its importance to the business, and identifying duplication of effort and data. The analysis surfaced obsolete software, security vulnerabilities linked to the age of certain components, and operational inefficiencies where automation was absent but achievable.
The results:
We produced a full system architecture and data catalogue, documenting current data sources, primary data flows, and a data quality assessment across the estate. The client came away with a clear, consolidated picture of its technology landscape for the first time — the foundation it needed to make informed decisions about its application and data strategy going forwards..
