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SoftwareOne case study

Putting Gebrüder Meier on the road to flexibility

A man working on a motor in a factory.

Accelerating innovation with SAP on Azure

Gebrüder Meier AG is a Swiss service provider for electrical machines and mechanical problem solutions. The company’s SAP landscape comprised two systems hosted and operated on its in-house servers. As its server hardware approached the end of its lifecycle, the company needed to plan for a new solution. Its strategy was to migrate its SAP ERP to the cloud, but it needed a project partner with extensive cloud experience.

In addition to SAP and public cloud expertise, Gebrüder Meier AG also values a cost-efficient solution and a provider of efficient customer care. As a result, Gebrüder Meier AG engaged SoftwareOne to migrate its SAP ERP from in-house to Microsoft Azure with a database upgrade and unicode conversion. By moving its SAP ERP to Azure, Gebrüder Meier AG has increased resilience and SAP scalability and expanded the flexibility of its environment while reducing infrastructure expenses.

Gebrüder Meier AG logo
Client
Gebrüder Meier AG
Industry
Manufacturing
Services
‘Lift-and-shift’ migration of SAP ERP to Microsoft Azure including database upgrade and unicode conversion, supported by additional Managed Services and SoftwareOne’s shared Solution Manager, running on Azure
Country
Germany
We were impressed by SoftwareOne’s highly professional project organization. The exchange of information and the distribution of tasks was structured and efficient. SoftwareOne obtained all the information it needed from the old provider without the need of our involvement, which was an enormous relief for us.

Eveline Saxer
CFO, Gebrüder Meier AG

About the client

With its extensive range of services, Gebrüder Meier AG has been one of the leading service providers in Switzerland since 1918. They offer solutions from individual products to complete plant services in the areas of motors, generators, gearboxes, frequency converters, control engineering, mechanical production and locksmiths. Thanks to their three strategically distributed locations, customers receive responsive and high-quality services throughout Switzerland. Gebrüder Meier AG is a flexible and innovative partner for electrical and mechanical problem solutions, serving more than 3,000 customers every year.

The challenge

Gebrüder Meier AG has a compact SAP landscape comprised of two systems that were hosted and operated on in-house servers. As its server hardware was reaching the end of its lifecycle, a solution for the next few years had to be found. Gebrüder Meier AG wanted to migrate its SAP systems to the cloud, and was wanted a partner with extensive cloud experience to assist.

In addition to SAP and public cloud expertise, Gebrüder Meier AG values a cost-efficient solution and a provider with efficient customer care services.

A man is working on a large machine in a factory.

The solution

With more than 5 years’ experience in SAP on Azure, SoftwareOne covered the main prerequisites as a new provider for Gebrüder Meier AG. The important requirement for data security was ensured by the hyperscale provider, Microsoft Azure.

The migration of the SAP systems was carried out in stages over two weekends. The project was completed successfully, without any problems nor the need to draw on the fallback scenarios, which had previously been played through. With the prospect that Gebrüder Meier AG is planning to migrate to HANA and upgrade to EHP8 at a later point, SoftwareOne AG conducted a unicode conversion together with the Azure migration. After some tests by Gebrüder Meier AG’s specialist departments, the systems went live.

The result

  • ‘Lift-and-shift’ migration of SAP ERP to Microsoft Azure with a database upgrade and unicode conversion
  • Decoupling from future investments
  • Reduction in infrastructure expenditure
  • Increased resilience and scalability of SAP environment
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