Carving-out from
the Engie Group 

Yuma and Equans

Equans is a large global company with its headquarters based in France. It has 95,000 employees worldwide, including 11,000 in Belgium. After working successfully together on an SAP project, the next challenging project was the carve out of the Engie Group. This necessitated the development of various streams to ensure that business continuity was maintained.

The Belgian Head of Architecture was appointed global stream lead for procurement and HR, and his team was responsible for ensuring business continuity after the cut off in July 2022. The project started in September 2021, so in less than a year, solutions for about 140 applications were needed. The XPLUS architects supported in the preparation.

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The challengePrepare the carve-out from Engie Group and ensure business continuity in less than a year.
 

What we didMapping of all the applications on a capability map and preparing the carve out with pragmatic solutions.
 

The resultsA successful carve out, with a continuous partnership between XPLUS and Equans with our people working in the architecture team on different programs.

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Being pragmatic in the approach
makes the difference

One of the first steps in the project was to map the systems and tools used globally for procurement and HR, to determine which were used locally and which were still used by the group. Working closely with local IT and business stakeholders to develop an overview of the landscape: which systems could still be used, and which needed to be replaced with new solutions. XPLUS helped to define the necessary actions to ensure business continuity and provided input for the negotiations with providers.

The project was complicated by the fact that Equans is an international company, with calls and meetings taking place with stakeholders around the world, including in Australia and South America.

The most important differentiator in the XPLUS approach: being pragmatic. The approach was not about creating extensive slidedecks, but about finding solutions that work.

“We needed a partner that was part of the team and had a pragmatic approach, and that was exactly what XPLUS brought into the collaboration.”
Tom Oostens: Head of Architecture & Development Equans

Continuous impact starting from a strong partnership

The project strengthened the partnership between Equans and XPLUS, demonstrating the importance of trusted partnerships in achieving business objectives. The XPLUS consultants give input to grow the maturity of the architecture practice.

Important steps were taken to improve processes and governance for architecture. With LeanIX architecture tooling was implemented. The tooling gives an overview of the 540 applications in the organization. Also a roadmap was developed and demand management processes were implemented. The XPLUS enterprise architects form a close-knit team with the Equans BeLux architects.
 

And the journey continues

XPLUS and Equans continue to work together on other projects. 

With the Axiss project, Equans aims to find synergies between the different Equans entities and work towards bringing their applications towards the Equans target platform. The platform includes applications like Salesforce for Sales and Field Services and SAP for finance.

Another project of note was the optimization and improvement of Maximo, a CMMS system focused on asset management an maintence of these assets, providing Equans with the ability to track which assets were installed where, schedule maintenance, and plan resources accordingly.
 

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Pieter Dubois
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