Digitalization and import substitution of IT in Lamoda

2025

Lamoda has taken up import substitution of IT systems, having no obligations to regulators and the law

Speaking at the TAdviser conference "Import substitution 2025: real experience" on February 19, Stanislav Gotz, Director of the Lamoda Business Applications and Platforms Department, spoke about the company's approaches and experience in import substitution.

There are no regulatory requirements for import substitution for the company, and everything that it does in this regard is somehow related to risk management. At the same time, it is important to understand that the classic risks when triggered have a different impact on the company and a different probability of this triggering. Thus, these risks can be ranked, prioritized, etc.

Import substitution in 2022 began with the fact that Lamoda collected a register of all imported software that it used at that time. The register totaled 32 points. Moreover, we are not talking about the number of vendors or copies of software, but about upper-level aggregation - a business orientation where imported software is used, Stanislav Gotz specified.

For each of these points, they described the likelihood of a risk triggering and the impact on the business: what will happen if tomorrow there is no access to this software or it stops working. The most dangerous risk is stopping some critical process. They also assessed the timing and upper-level budgets required for import substitution. After that, it became clear in what sequence what to do.

Presentation by Stanislav Gotz

Stanislav Gotz cited as an example several specific cases that can already be considered completed projects. The first is a cloud infrastructure provider. Until 2022, Lamoda used global providers to host its services and systems. These were the GCP and Amazon clouds. Then the company was part of the international holding Global Fashion Group, and the use of these platforms was standard for the group's companies. They hosted, among other things, part of the product production servers. Accordingly, due to the termination of access to them, sales and order acceptance could stand.

At that time, there were already Russian providers who tried to compete with global ones, but there was no understanding where to move specifically. And the decision had to be made urgently. And the company decided to cooperate with two, but in the end they strategically began to work more with one of them. The difference in expenses did not work out much.

The second case is related to import substitution of the ERP system of Microsoft Dynamics 365. Here, the risk of influencing the business was also assessed as the maximum. ERP was placed in the vendor cloud and used according to the SaaS model. At the same time, it was unrealistic to quickly migrate to something domestic, said Stanislav Gotz. According to the company's estimates, full migration could take up to 3 years with investments from 1.5 billion rubles.

Therefore, in order to reduce the risk to the company, it was decided to move to an on-premium decision. For 2 months, Lamoda moved its ERP installation from the cloud to its own equipment and isolated the system circuit. And then they began to systematically analyze what can be done with this ERP and whether something needs to be done with it at all. As a result, they decided to postpone only part of the processes related to finance, accounting, and the treasury, and completed this migration in 9 months. "1C: Holding Management" was chosen as the solution.

At the same time, the company conducted such processes as personnel management and payroll until 2022 in 1C.

The third case involves replacing the financial planning and analysis system. Used Anaplan according to the SaaS model. And disabling it would only affect internal ones business processes related to finances, that is, the risk is far from critical. Lamoda switched to the Russian solution in this part. Optimacros

The total IT staff at Lamoda of the order as of 2025 is 700. Not all are involved in import substitution, but about 70% of work in this area is closed on its own.