Into the cloud at full speed

ElringKlinger is a leading global system partner to the automotive industry for lightweight solutions, electromobility, sealing and shielding technology, tooling, and engineering services. ElringKlinger of fers innovative product solutions for all drive types. Founded in 1879 and based in Dettingen/Erms, the company maintains production and sales facilities at 45 locations in 20 countries.

ElringKlinger operates a complex SAP landscape with more than 30 multi-level and critical systems, including Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Supplier Relationship Management (SRM), and SAP Manufacturing Execution (MES), including the standalone SAP archiving solution. To ensure the continued in-house operation of the environment, the group would have had to make a substantial investment. In addition, the requirements for the operation of on-premises data centers were constantly increasing. The previous in-house operations model was no longer able to meet the constantly growing challenges and also contradicted the company’s strategic IT goals, such as “cloud first.”

The IT managers therefore decided to issue an invitation to bid involving leading cloud providers and service providers on the market. “Our goal was to establish a strong IT partner and to transfer our existing systems and processes to a stable, fail-safe, and future-oriented SAP operating model,” recalls Benjamin Friedrich, former Head of Application Technology at ElringKlinger. As part of this, the partner was not only tasked with migrating the entire SAP landscape, but also with taking over and professionally handling basic operations. All cloud services had to meet the strict compliance requirements in the automotive sector, such as TISAX and ISO27001.

ElringKlinger and Fujitsu had already enjoyed a long-standing partnership based on trust. For example, the automotive supplier has been successfully operating a FlexFrame solution under its own management since 2003. This is an IT infrastructure solution from Fujitsu for SAP system landscapes. Based on this positive experience, the IT managers decided to bring the proven partner on board for the SAP migration as well. “What was important to us was a rapid implementation of the transition project within 2021 with minimal downtime, so that we would be able to transfer our core business systems to the new environment in a timely manner,” explains Benjamin Friedrich. Fujitsu fully met this requirement on its Fujitsu Service Hub platform: The migration of the 30 SAP systems started in August 2021, enabling them to go live by the end of October.

Ultimately, ElringKlinger was able to significantly improve system stability and reliability thanks to clearly defined service level agreements and cutting-edge scalability in the Fujitsu Virtual Private Cloud. In addition, it was possible to standardize and accelerate important SAP operating processes, such as security updates, system upgrades, patches, and maintenance tasks. “During the project, Fujitsu’s team provided support on an equal footing and with an extraordinary degree of dedication, both personally and in terms of technical skills. Thanks to our new service partner’s powerful and scalable platform and extensive expertise, we now benefit from the stable, highly available, and fail-safe operation of our complex and interconnected SAP landscape,” says Benjamin Friedrich.