In Aerospace and Defense (A&D), transformation is never just about modernization. It is about mission assurance, program continuity, and the ability to operate with precision across highly complex, regulated, and interdependent environments.
At SAP Sapphire, the company shared insights from its 1LMX transformation program, one of the most ambitious SAP S/4HANA initiatives in the industry. With operations spanning air, land, sea, space, and cyber domains, and a global workforce of 120,000 employees, Lockheed Martin is executing transformation at a scale and complexity that reflects the unique demands of A&D enterprises.
What makes this journey especially relevant for industry leaders is not just the technology being implemented, but how the organization is approaching one of the most critical risks in any transformation: data.
As Whitney Holland, who leads the Lockheed Martin Data Conversion Enablement Organization, explained, the program is focused on more than a successful go-live. It is about building a foundation that supports long-term execution across multiple, overlapping releases through 2029. So while the first major milestone was achieved in January 2026, the broader transformation is still in motion.
Transformations of this caliber often encounter late-stage data cleansing, fragmented tooling, unclear ownership, and siloed execution across teams. At scale, these challenges become more pronounced, leading to rework, delays, and lack of confidence in the data. But one of the most important takeaways from Lockheed Martin’s journey is that many data conversion challenges are not execution failures. They are structural issues that emerge when data is treated as a downstream activity.
For Lockheed Martin, success lay in evolving data conversion from a technical process into an enterprise capability, fully integrated across the transformation lifecycle.
In A&D, data directly impacts mission performance, safety, and compliance. Lockheed Martin’s emphasis on moving from “loaded” to “trusted” data reinforces that transformation success depends on whether core processes execute reliably.
True transformation requires data that supports business outcomes with consistency and reliability. That means progressing through several stages of maturity, from loaded data to verified data, from verified data to quality data, and ultimately to trusted data.
If financial close, supply chain execution, or manufacturing data is not trusted, the mission is at risk.
Trusted data enables end-to-end processes such as financial close, costing, and supply chain execution to run efficiently and predictably. It eliminates the uncertainty that often accompanies large system changes. For A&D executives, this reframes data conversion as part of operational readiness, not just system readiness.
Lockheed Martin’s approach centered on bringing data considerations forward and embedding them across every phase of the program.
Because of this, rather than waiting until development or testing phases, the team at Lockheed Martin began data quality and cleansing activities well in advance. In some cases, this work started a year before implementation milestones.
Business teams across future releases were engaged early, trained on data quality expectations, and provided with self-service access to dashboards and reporting. These capabilities were connected directly to legacy systems, giving real-time visibility into data health.
By enabling business users with dashboards, self-service capabilities, and training, Lockheed Martin ensured data ownership stayed close to the source. In industries like A&D, where data spans multiple disciplines such as engineering configuration, parts and materials, and program cost controls, making the business accountable from the outset is non-negotiable.
This early investment also created momentum and allowed teams to address issues proactively rather than reactively. In heavily regulated environments, the ability to identify and address data issues early has outsized impact. And in an industry where certification cycles can be long, testing environments constrained, and errors cascade into costly compliance risks, A&D cannot afford late-stage surprises. Lockheed Martin’s shift-left approach demonstrates how early cleansing and validation can materially reduce risk before cutover.
In A&D, end-to-end process validation is critical to ensure the system supports costing accuracy, manufacturing execution, and financial reconciliation. Traditional system testing only confirmed if data loaded successfully, rather than mirror operational reality. Systems must be proven under real-world conditions before go-live, not just technically validated.
Realizing this, Lockheed Martin moved toward more continuous validation and automation strategy. Rather than confining validation to cutover, it became a continuous process that began early and matured over time.
Business and IT teams collaborated to define repeatable validation processes. Automation and AI-enabled capabilities were introduced to accelerate execution, reducing validation cycles from hours to minutes.
By the time cutover approached, validation had already been exercised multiple times through mock scenarios, significantly reducing risk.
Whitney Holland adds:
"Standardize your methodology. Have a consistent process with tooling, processes, reviews. Everybody knows what to expect, and you do it uniformly across your product teams. With scalability, standardization is key."
Detailed design became a critical focus area. Instead of relying solely on technical mappings, Lockheed Martin emphasized a deeper understanding of business requirements.
Cross-functional teams participated in design sessions, ensuring alignment from the outset. Governance structures were established to evaluate changes and manage downstream impacts across integrated processes.
"Enable the business to be partners with you as you engage in the data quality, the specifications, as well as the validations," Holland recommended.
This approach reduced rework and improved confidence in the final solution.
Fragmentation is a major risk in multi-domain enterprises. A&D companies often operate across air, land, sea, space, and cyber domains. Each domain introduces its own data models, processes, and legacy systems.
For A&D leaders, unifying the ecosystem is more than efficiency. It is about maintaining a single source of truth across mission domains.
Recognizing this, Lockheed Martin actively removed organizational silos. Business stakeholders were empowered as data owners, while IT provided the tools and frameworks needed to support execution.
Whitney Holland emphasized the importance unifying the ecosystem in order to maximize the capabilities of investments:
"Leverage your investments so that you have one holistic view with consistent processes and tooling in which you've enabled the business to be partners with while you move everything left to get ahead of moving the data and getting through data conversion, not as an afterthought or a downstream technical task at cutover, but as a fully integrated enterprise capability throughout the life cycle of the project.”
This alignment ensured that decisions were made with a full understanding of their enterprise impact and ensured program alignment to enterprise standards.
A&D transformations are rarely one-time events. They span years, sometimes decades, with overlapping releases and evolving requirements.
Some guiding principles that emerged were:
These principles are especially important for large-scale enterprises, where transformation programs often overlap, systems remain in use, and data most remain consistent across environments.
As Lockheed Martin continues its transformation journey, the role of data remains central. With multiple releases still ahead, the organization is focused on scaling its approach while maintaining consistency and control.
For Aerospace and Defense leaders, the implications are clear. In an environment where data must support everything from engineering and manufacturing to financial controls and compliance, data conversion is not a back-end activity. Rather, it is a strategic capability that underpins operational readiness.
Lockheed Martin’s experience demonstrates that success depends on a fundamental shift in mindset. Data must be treated as an enterprise asset from the very beginning, embedded into design, validated continuously, and trusted to perform under real-world conditions.