Ritter Energie – Carbon-neutral: SAP environment migrates into the cloud

Ritter Energie- und Umwelttechnik GmbH & Co. KG – Carbon-neutral: SAP environment migrates into the cloud.

In 1988, just after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, chocolate maker Alfred T. Ritter, founded Ritter Energie, which is today a leader in the solar industry. Ritter Energie’s solar heating systems improve the carbon footprint of any heating system, and to ensure that the company itself remains carbon-neutral, they have developed an ecologically-consistent business model that includes an SAP landscape to organise business processes. Bechtle’s SAP experts supported Ritter Energie in migrating their on-premise operations into the cloud, also taking on responsibility for their managed services.

Project details.

Services

Software
Managed Services
Cloud

Industry

Manufacturing

Manufacturer

Company size

< 250 employees

Challenge.

Ecology is at the heat of everything Ritter Energie- und Umwelttechnik GmbH & Co. KG does. After the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1988, chocolate maker Alfred T. Ritter founded the company after the hazelnut crop needed to produce the famous Ritter Sport chocolate was contaminated in Turkey. He was looking for an ecological alternative to nuclear power and found just what he was looking for in solar energy. Now, for over 30 years, the company has been developing and producing various solutions that enable ecological and solar heating using renewable energy. Ritter Energie’s two main brands are Paradigma (small systems) and Ritter XL Solar (large systems) for which evacuated tube collectors produced in Dettenhausen, Baden-Württemberg are used. With these and other energy generation components, the company also ensures minimal CO2 emissions when heating water or the home, which in turn protects the environment and creates ecological value. Ritter Energie also wants to operate carbon-neutrally, through the use of their own ecologically consequent or “ecoquent” business model.

For us, carbon-neutrality begins with how we organise our business processes. Our SAP environment has to be reliable, but we didn’t want to have to manage it ourselves. We found the perfect partner in Bechtle’s SAP experts. Thanks to them, since the migration of the SAP landscape into the cloud, we no longer have to worry about hardware components or the basic operation of the SAP systems.

Sibylle Maier, Head of IT, Ritter Energie- und Umwelttechnik GmbH & Co. KG

Solution.

It’s not only energy generation through the use of ecological energy production solutions that should be carbon-neutral at Ritter Energie. The company also wanted to set up their IT as efficiently and future-proof as possible. Ritter Energie use a variety of SAP solutions both in-house and in contact with their customers and, thanks to SAP’s product portfolio, Ritter Energie was already having a positive economic, ecological and social impact. But that wasn’t enough. The company wanted to go a step further and migrate their SAP systems into the cloud. Instead of searching for their own solution and handling the migration themselves, Ritter Energie turned to Bechtle and its own cloud. The SAP specialists supported Ritter Energie in designing and installing their new Bechtle Cloud for SAP solution. Bechtle created the necessary backups from the source system, managing to transfer the complete SAP system landscape to HANA 2.0 in the Bechtle Cloud without the loss of any crucial customer data.

The SAP source system (Windows Oracle) was migrated to SUSE Enterprise Server (SLES) for SAP while the new SAP HANA database (HANA 2.0) was implemented using Database Migration Option (DMO) best practices. Once the migration had been successfully completed, Bechtle installed Solution Manager 7.2 as a central application and admin solution for Ritter Energie.

To round off the project, Bechtle took seamless control of the landscape’s managed services with the experts providing support with a range of activities such as change, database, incident and problem management, as well as monitoring and patching (OS, HANA, SAP), system and tenant copies and much more. In this way, the company were able to completely dedicate themselves to its mission of creating a greener future in its everyday business while the SAP landscape organises business processes.

Business benefits.

Through the centrally managed migration of the SAP landscape into the Bechtle Cloud, Ritter Energie has been able to leverage the synergies within the company and its brands. Instead of searching for standalone solutions, Bechtle took care of everything from a single source. Now, Ritter Energie doesn’t have to maintain its own IT infrastructures for running the SAP environment. Redundant IT resources can be avoided as far as possible and resources allocated that Ritter Energie needs to organise their SAP-based daily business. Thanks to Bechtle, Ritter Energie’s SAP landscape is not only reliable, but also keeps costs down.