Greenfield Conversion

The family-owned company Dehner is a group of companies operating throughout Europe with its headquarters in Rain am Lech, Bavaria. Founded in 1947 as a two-person operation, Dehner is now the leading cross-channel retailer in the "green industry" with over 5700 employees. In the future, Dehner also wants to grow dynamically and continuously expand its own position as a leading supplier. To achieve this, the company is consistently expanding its digital offerings and needs the right technological platform to map its business processes.

S/4 Private Cloud

Conquering new markets requires continuous innovation and a future-proof system landscape. This is why Dehner launched the largest change project within the group in late summer 2021: the migration of its central SAP systems in a greenfield approach to the new S/4 Hana product generation in the cloud. However, not all clouds are the same. The provider with which the SAP systems are operated has a not insignificant influence on how they contribute to increasing business success. The form of hosting can be a building block for success in the efficient use of S/4. Disadvantages arise when development projects running in parallel are slowed down because system upgrades take too long or the response times of the services do not meet expectations. Dehner opted for Microsoft Azure operations in order to achieve project goals faster and more efficiently. The migration from SAP Hana Enterprise Cloud (HEC) was set up with this in mind. From the beginning, Dehner's S/4 systems ran on Azure hardware, that is, in Microsoft's public cloud infrastructure. The migration work consisted of unplugging the complex SAP landscape from the HEC and transferring it to the Azure areas managed by FIS-ASP.

"Even for operations at the hyperscaler, a coherent understanding of service is important for collaboration and project success. Reliability and speed of implementation remain critical. Administration and pragmatic working methods need balance. FIS-ASP as a proven expert in managed services for SAP on Azure is known for high service quality," says Achim Sperlich, IT architect and responsible for the hosting project at Dehner.

A joint project team of experts was formed to ensure a clean and fast implementation of the cloud migration. In the process, the detailed planning of the migration project was able to take into account the S/4 implementation running in parallel at the Dehner Garden Center. With best practices from Microsoft, SAP and FIS-ASP, the migration was carried out smoothly and within the planned time window between September and December 2022.

In concrete terms, service for Dehner means that whoever is the contact person for the customer during the migration project remains so later during operation. The IT department has known contacts at its provider and they respond to inquiries within a short time. For example, S/4 upgrades run twice as fast compared to the service before.

Cloud and cloud backup

In addition to Azure cloud and SAP application know-how, FIS-ASP also has proven Microsoft 365 expertise, which we can draw on if necessary," says Markus Freitag, IT manager at Dehner. "Added to this is the possibility of combining our systems with FIS-ASP's own high-availability data centers." As planned, the garden specialist can switch off additional servers and outsource its own hardware to FIS-ASP in the process. It then operates its virtual machines as a co-location in Grafenrheinfeld, while these are connected to the SAP systems on Azure in hybrid operation. (pmf)