Lean Chain's customers were both suppliers to the automotive aftermarkets, i.e. manufacturers of items such as exhaust pipes, tyres and wind screens, and chains of distribution outlets and fitters. Lean Chain's transaction platform allowed the latter to order electronically from the former with a minimum of integration effort from the trading partners. Effectively, customers outsourced partner integration to Lean Chain as its platform transformed senders' message formats to appropriate receivers' formats.

While Lean Chain promoted the use of OAGIS XML formats, it also integrated with producers and consumers of other XML documents, as well as EDIFACT and plain text messages. The core of the Lean Chain platform was a webMethods B2B server, performing message transformations. webMethods for Trading Networks was used to connect to customer ERP systems. Transport protocols included HTTP, FTP and SMTP. Alternatively, products could be ordered interactively at an online marketplace implemented in Oracle Exchange, on top of Oracle Application Suite and an Oracle database. The webMethods server also connected to the Oracle database. The web application was supplemented with custom-developed JSPs to check and show information such as item availability. The infrastructure was fully redundant, based on clustered Sun Solaris servers.