How Lekkerland Broke Free From Their SAP Monolith With a Self-Service Platform

Lekkerland's departments depended on centralized IT for every data request. easy.bi extracted services from the SAP monolith into a self-service platform - cutting IT bottlenecks and preparing for SAP S4/HANA.

Self-service

Department data access

Modular

Microservice architecture

S4/HANA

Migration-ready platform

Faster

Application delivery cycles

Lekkerland Information Systems GmbH project showcase

The Challenge: Every Department Stuck Behind a Single IT Queue

Lekkerland Information Systems GmbH is the technology arm of one of Europe's largest convenience product distributors. Their SAP system held the data that every department needed - sales figures, inventory levels, logistics data, customer records. The problem wasn't the data. It was getting to it.

Every request for data, every new report, every application that needed SAP information went through centralized IT. Specialized departments - logistics, sales, finance - couldn't build their own tools or access their own data without submitting tickets and waiting. Development cycles were long. Simple requests sat in queues behind complex projects.

The SAP monolith made things worse. Services were tightly coupled, meaning changes in one area could break functionality in another. Teams hesitated to modify anything, and the system became increasingly rigid as the business needed it to become more flexible.

Compounding the urgency: Lekkerland was preparing for an SAP S4/HANA upgrade. Migrating a tightly coupled monolith to S4/HANA would be exponentially more complex and costly than migrating a modular architecture. The clock was ticking to decompose the monolith - not someday, but now.

“Every time a department needed data from SAP, they filed a ticket and waited. Some requests took weeks. The business was moving faster than our IT processes could support.”

Why Lekkerland Chose easy.bi

Lekkerland needed a partner who could think architecturally and execute technically. The challenge wasn't just building a new platform - it was extracting services from a running SAP system without disrupting daily operations. That required deep experience with both enterprise integration patterns and modern microservice architectures.

easy.bi brought exactly that combination. The team had built API-driven platforms with Symfony and ApiPlatform, managed event-driven architectures with Kafka and RabbitMQ, and deployed on Kubernetes at enterprise scale. Critically, easy.bi understood that the real goal wasn't technology - it was giving departments the autonomy to serve themselves.

“easy.bi understood that the technical challenge was secondary to the organizational one. We didn't just need microservices - we needed departments to be able to serve themselves.”

The Approach: Extract, Modularize, and Empower

Platform conceptualization. easy.bi began by mapping the data flows and service dependencies within the SAP monolith. The team identified which services could be extracted first with the least risk, which departments had the most urgent need for self-service access, and how data would flow between the new platform and SAP during the transition period.

Microservice extraction. Individual services were extracted from the SAP monolith into standalone microservices built with Symfony and ApiPlatform. Each service owned its data, communicated through well-defined APIs, and could be developed, deployed, and scaled independently. Redis handled caching and session management. Postgres provided the persistence layer for extracted services.

Event-driven architecture. Kafka and RabbitMQ formed the communication backbone between services. This event-driven approach meant services stayed decoupled - a change in one service didn't cascade into failures across others. It also enabled real-time data synchronization between the new platform and the legacy SAP system during the migration period.

Self-service capabilities. The platform was designed so specialized departments could build and deploy their own applications and services. Instead of submitting IT tickets, teams could access data through APIs, build department-specific tools, and deliver solutions on their own timeline. This transformed IT from a bottleneck into an enabler.

S4/HANA migration readiness. Every architectural decision was made with the SAP S4/HANA upgrade in mind. The modular architecture means Lekkerland can migrate to S4/HANA incrementally - service by service - rather than attempting a risky big-bang cutover.

“The event-driven architecture was the right call. We can run the new platform alongside SAP without data conflicts, and migrate to S4/HANA incrementally instead of all at once.”

The Results: Departments Move at Their Own Speed

The self-service platform fundamentally changed how Lekkerland's departments interact with their data. Teams that previously waited weeks for IT to deliver a report or build a tool now access data directly through APIs and build what they need themselves.

Development velocity increased across the organization. New applications and services are delivered faster because departments own their development cycles. Centralized IT focuses on platform reliability and architecture rather than fielding individual data requests.

The modular architecture has positioned Lekkerland for a controlled SAP S4/HANA migration. Instead of a monolithic cutover, they can migrate services incrementally - reducing risk and allowing the business to continue operating normally throughout the transition.