Stiftung kreuznacher diakonie – Two SAP worlds built on one hardware foundation

Stiftung kreuznacher diakonie – Two SAP worlds built on one hardware foundation.

The kreuznacher diakonie charitable foundation runs over 120 facilities where some 6,800 staff are supporting and tending to people every single day, advising and taking care of the sick and dying, older people and children, people with disabilities and the homeless. To ensure everything runs efficiently and smoothly, the foundation leverages modern technologies such as SAP. Thanks to Bechtle, a comprehensive SAP landscape for accounting, controlling and the management of patients, medication and catering is installed in several data centres.

Project details.

Services

Managed Services
Software

Industry

Pharmaceutical / Healthcare

Manufacturer

Dell, SAP

Company size

> 1,500 employees

Challenge.

For 130 years, the kreuznacher diakonie foundation has been providing ecclesiastical social services at their facilities in Rhineland-Palatinate, Saarland and Hesse. As part of an overhaul of its internal organisational structures and processes, the foundation had introduced SAP S/4HANA a few years previously. To support this, Bechtle now put together a powerful and reliable infrastructure using Dell Technologies server and storage solutions, but not everything could be moved over. This was particularly the case for the healthcare applications that still required an SAP environment with SAP ECC/ERP. In a follow-up project, Bechtle migrated these to the new hardware and HANA 2.0 at the same time.

The collaboration with Bechtle in these projects was excellent and the SAP systems and interfaces it set up run smoothly and deliver high performance.

Armin Zielinski, Head of SC/IT SAP, Stiftung kreuznacher diakonie A public ecclesiastical foundation

kreuznacher diakonie’s restructured organisation takes advantage of a new service centre and more streamlined processes, but this meant that significant modifications had to be made to the SAP environment, including reducing the number of company codes, setting up a new cost centre hierarchy and introducing profit centres and business partner models. The logical consequence of all this was for the foundation to take a greenfield approach with the introduction of SAP S/4HANA.

The biggest challenge with this was that the foundation didn’t want to completely replace its existing SAP ECC/ERP as SAP S/4HANA doesn’t have a solution for the healthcare industry. For healthcare customers, SAP is planning to take advantage of cloud solutions instead. The foundation therefore continues to use SAP ECC/ERP for patient management and invoicing, clinical documentation and HR. And this was exactly what was to be integrated into the new environment via an interface to S/4HANA with the accounting, controlling and logistics modules. The advantage is that, for those using the healthcare apps, nothing changes as they will continue to use the tools they are familiar with.

Solution.

For the additional SAP S/4 landscape, Bechtle worked together with DELL and SAP to plan a new hardware infrastructure, the migration of the SAP ECC/ERP system onto it, and the simultaneous upgrade of the database to HANA 2.0.

The hardware now consists of new Dell PowerEdge servers and new Dell EMC Unity 400 Storage. In addition, Bechtle visualised the environment with VMware and implemented the S/4 and BW/4 systems as an SAP basis. SAP configured and tested the functionality and interfaces together with the kreuznacher diakonie foundation before they went live at the beginning of 2019.

From the get-go, the plan was to migrate SAP ECC/ERP to the Dell infrastructure as soon as the maintenance contracts had ended. Together with Bechtle, the foundation scaled the new hardware in such a way that there’s sufficient capacity for the legacy SAP landscape. The foundation only had to expand the RAM of two PowerEdge servers to achieve more performance reserves, which Bechtle leveraged to move SAP ECC/ERP to the Dell systems in 2020, updating the SAP database to HANA 2.0 at the same time.

Business benefits.

Bechtle provided the kreuznacher diakonie foundation with a concept and implementation and its SAP experts continue to monitor the SAP landscape to this day. Thanks to Bechtle’s Managed Services the foundation also receives everything from a single source and if the foundation’s resources ever become limited, Bechtle is on hand to provide manpower and expertise around the clock. If required, Bechtle also handles SAP updates/patches, VMware installations and other service requests so that the kreuznacher diakonie foundation does not always have to take care of them itself.