"Lemana Pro" is rebuilding IT. Technical Director Nikolai Knysh - about the details in an interview with TAdviser

Nikolay Knysh: As for the organizational structure, all IT specialists of the company have long been transferred to a separate division. This was done, as in many companies in the IT market. But this makes more sense, and it is this: we grew quite extensively and expansively - on average, we grew by 30% year-on-year on investment in IT, and came to pay more attention to efficiency. We can develop quickly and powerfully, and we had to understand how to get the most out of it. To this end, our organizational changes are directed to a greater extent - to turn IT from a cost center (cost division) into a profit center (earning division).

This can be achieved in two ways. The first is that you can start selling proprietary software. We have something to sell, because we essentially fully provide ourselves from the point of view of information systems: Lehman Missile Defense has developed a complete set of software necessary for the main processes, from sales management to warehouse logistics, store management, etc.

However, at the moment we have chosen another way to become a earning division - to build a commercial approach in which the team is responsible for business metrics. Now IT teams are built around components: for example, there is a team of an Internet portal, a mobile application, payments, etc. But no team is responsible for either the client path from beginning to end, or for how much we earn in general. And the task is to build teams together with the business around client paths. For example, there should be an Internet sales team that has in its arsenal all the necessary tools, from the basket to payments and logistics, to completely close the client's path.

This will remove the need to involve and synchronize the work of several commands at once in case of any changes. With this approach, there are understandable KPIs and you can easily determine which teams and what numbers are needed for certain tasks.

Nikolay Knysh: Perestroika of everything does not work here at once, and we apply an evolutionary approach, not a revolutionary approach. This is due to the huge amount of training, explaining to employees why we are making these changes and what they will bring them. We want employees to accept these changes, not "blow up" the whole company.

Technologically and organizationally, this is not an easy story. The new model assumes a complete transition to internal open source software. If earlier only the team responsible for the mobile application could make changes to the source code, now any developer in the company can change the source code of the mobile application. At the same time, there is a challenge - to teach everyone how to properly develop mobile applications, and to ensure that the mobile application command itself is ready for such a model. Thus, there are still many organizational and technical issues to be resolved here, including, for example, this: who is to blame if the mobile application "fell"?

Accordingly, the transition will not be carried out quickly. The site, mobile application, systems that ensure the operation of stores, payments, logistics and delivery will be the first areas that affect these large-scale changes. I think that we will cover about 15 applications by going into this story. And we expect to complete it completely by the end of 2026.

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Фото: Lehmana Pro

Nikolay Knysh: This was preceded by large-scale work on import substitution of all key digital solutions and platforms. We needed to switch to our own IT systems after separating the business from our foreign "roots," and we were focused on that. Over the past year, we switched to our own IT solutions, rewrote, modified and localized about 160 systems out of about 250. And when we successfully completed this, it was time to focus on a strategy for further development and launch our own IT brand.

Nikolai Knysh: For example, our entire warehouse management worked on software from a European developer who left Russia. And we needed to write our WMS in a short time . At the end of 2024, we migrated to it with the loss of part of the functionality, and in March 2025 we already completely switched to our own solution with full functionality.

And there are a lot of similar large systems that we have replaced. Including this is everything related to procurement management. Previously, it also worked on foreign solutions. And now we use our own developments. The same can be said about the program loyalty- now it works on our own, localized solution. A lot of work has also been done on the areas of infrastructure and. information security

Nikolai Knysh: But it should be noted that, despite the lack of emergency, our migration plans were still ambitious, the deadlines were tight: the task was to replace everything in a little less than a year. I haven't seen this done anywhere before.

Nikolay Knysh: We are talking about the period of the last three years, when we actively invested in the creation of a team and processes. Today we want to focus on infrastructure: we need to significantly update our fleet of computers and network solutions.

To understand the scale of the update - we now use about 50 thousand of our own CPUs and we take about the same amount from external partners. But the ratio of its own and cloud infrastructure of about 50/50 is not a strategic state that we want to come to. We need to be independent of whatever happens in the market.

You can ensure this by building your own data center, but it is very expensive - from $100 thousand per rack, and taking into account service even more expensive. But we, nevertheless, a chain of stores and build data centers are not our key business. Therefore, the target state for us is the 20/40/40 for colocation of computing resources, an internal cloud on its "hardware" and rented clouds, respectively. At the same time, there must be more than one rented cloud in order to ensure independence from the service provider. And one of the stimulating factors, of course, is that external cloud services and services have recently risen significantly in price.

Nikolay Knysh: It seems to me that this is really becoming a trend. Because, for example, when some retailers built their data centers, this caused ridicule on the market. And then suddenly it turned out that everyone envied them. And now those who do not build their data centers at least resort to the services of colocation in order to be independent.

This is essentially a reversal from the trend in the west, where retail began to move to the clouds even earlier, and now it keeps almost everything in the clouds. And in our country, 2022 showed how vulnerable we are while in the cloud: at any moment it can be disconnected and business can stop because of this. Therefore, companies really began to think that it was necessary to at least balance the resources used, given that being placed only on their own resources is an expensive story, because the equipment requires regular updates.

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Фото: Lehmana Pro

Nikolay Knysh: Other major projects are related to our strategy, which involves the construction of a platform company. We will invest in the transition to platform mode. We are talking just about the development of the very client paths and the creation of a new client experience, which is not on the market now. Our task is to close this niche.

Nikolay Knysh: For example, turnkey repairs with a guarantee of a large retailer. From the point of view of purchasing behavior, there is a DIY ("do it yourself") model, when a client buys a can of paint and paints the kitchen himself. And then there is the "do it with me" model, when the client wants to make repairs in the kitchen, but does not know how to level the walls, but likes to paint. And the retailer provides him with a service for preparation and leveling, and then the client is already painting. This is one of the options where you can expand.

There is also a "do it for me" option, when the client chooses materials, and the retailer organizes repair work for him, attracting proven craftsmen. Moreover, in this case, we are talking about omnichannel experience, because the design and much more the client can do remotely, using digital technologies.

Nikolay Knysh: Internal Development Platform (IDP), an ecosystem of tools and services that supports the entire process of developing programs within the company, is one of the areas that we are now actively developing. In terms of organizational structure, we are very decentralized, accordingly, for us compliance with standards becomes very important, because teams "sit" in business, there are a lot of them, and it is very difficult to ensure homogeneity of quality. And we have already come to the point that compliance with the standards is measured automatically.

And the model we want to come to is "standard as code." It will be very difficult to violate the standard in it. For this, a special platform is being deployed. It is partially already working, and the task of next year is to bring it to the state of closing all layers: CI/CD, virtualization, microservices, etc.

Nikolay Knysh: We do everything that carries competitive advantages ourselves. Everything where there is know-how, where there is an opportunity to compete with competitors, should be inside. Because there were cases - both here and in my previous career - when some vendor made a unique solution for us that we came up with, and then started selling it on the open market. Accordingly, we immediately lost this competitive advantage.

At the same time, of course, there are some publicly available and almost standard products like route building or map building - we will not develop them ourselves.

This is the first criterion for dropping out, what to create yourself and what not. Thus, we have our own internal development, starting from the client front, as well as store management, employee performance and performance management, product calculation, sales support, all logistics, warehouse management, and working with partners. In all this, we see the possibility of competitive advantages, and therefore we automated all this ourselves.

Nikolay Knysh: Lemana Tech today unites about 1,200 IT specialists in 130 product teams that develop, test and support IT solutions for the entire retailer ecosystem.

Nikolay Knysh: Most would probably say that this is artificial intelligence. Everyone is engaged in it now, believing that he has the future. And I will say an unpopular thing: conditionally, in 2035 - not so distant in the future, human interaction will be a luxury, a laksheri segment. Human-to-human will become a privilege, not a mundane thing.

Moreover, most are introducing these technologies in order to save money. And we are implementing to relieve our employees from routine and boring tasks and free up more time for them to sell and communicate with the client. And when human-to-human gains even more value, we will already have a pool of loyal professionals to help us interact with the client.

Nikolay Knysh: We are actively developing this direction and consider it very promising. For many years now, we have a three-dimensional automated system for storing and moving Adapto goods in our Severnaya Zvezda warehouse in the Moscow Region. It operates on the basis of shuttles with built-in functions of sorting and dispensing goods in a given sequence and is equipped with conveyor lines for automated delivery of pallets to workstations, where operators disassemble and then complete ready-made pallets for shipment to stores. The system has a total capacity of 200 pallets or 6 thousand boxes of goods per hour.

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Фото: Lehmana Pro

In addition, we are now in our warehouse together with Yandex testing their roboruk-depaletizer with artificial intelligence. She disassembles the pallets, on which there are boxes of different sizes, shapes and weights, and puts them on the conveyor. Thus, she is trained to work exactly as we need to. The use of roboruca reduces the cost of depaletization operations by about 40% and increases their speed by up to two times. In general, we move consistently, trying to be at the forefront: everything that seems promising, interesting and useful to us is sure to test.

Nikolay Knysh: We have 19 warehouse facilities of different sizes and with varying degrees of automation and robotization of processes - distribution centers and darkstores. We are actively introducing robotization into warehouse and logistics processes. This allows you to automate many routine tasks, while increasing the efficiency and speed of their execution. For example, at the Severnaya Zvezda warehouse, about 30% of goods pass through this or that automation. Of the immediate plans - the introduction of floor robots. This is an unmanned storage technique of the fork type, which moves pallets around the warehouse. Using them will allow us to reduce the cost of operations by 50% and free up staff for other tasks.

Nikolay Knysh: We mainly work with Chinese technologies. In many directions, they offer unique solutions, for example, in floor robotization. At the same time, we very carefully approach the choice of companies with which we cooperate on robotization. Therefore, our main suppliers are only those companies that have already proven that the products that they represent work stably, are adapted for the Russian market and are highly efficient.