Customer Story
Dräger Accelerates Journey to SAP S/4HANA with Process Automation Fueled by Trusted Data
Life-saving global MedTech organization leverages Precisely Automate to advance digital transformation
16,000
employees
190
countries
1889
company founded
Overview
Founded in Lübeck in 1889, Dräger has grown into a large international enterprise in its fifth generation as a family-run business with over 16,000 employees in over 190 countries. The company manufactures and distributes medical and safety equipment to frontline workers and organizations, such as patient monitoring devices to hospitals.
The success of Dräger’s mission to protect, support, and save people’s lives through the deployment of medical and safety technology products in no small part relies on the company’s ability to move confidently and at speed. But to make the move to S/4HANA, the company required a solution to help them overcome complex data management challenges without being held back by the current system – particularly when carrying out data corrections, installations, and changes at scale.
Dräger’s IT operation are also distributed globally and operate with a “one-client ERP” system, where their production companies and a large portion of their sales and services companies are in this one SAP system. To effectively manage these internal processes, data quality is essential as the main ERP system often relies on one single point of truth.
With the 2027 deadline approaching for SAP users on legacy platforms to migrate to SAP S/4HANA, Dräger’s goal was to address their internal operations and resolve data management challenges in order to successfully make this transition. According to Gartner, this is a common setback, as two-thirds of companies that have yet to move to SAP S/4HANA have indicated that it’s due to the complexity of their data management.
Challenge
With so much data from various areas of the company, Dräger was experiencing complex data management challenges when it came to doing data corrections, installations, and changes at scale, which resulted in additional time and financial resources. “As a global organization with more than 80% of our workforce connected to our central SAP system, manual processes were creating data management inefficiencies across our business,” said Ina Hinckeldeyn, IT Consultant, I SAP Supply Chain Management and Data Management at Dräger.
All these adjustments fell on the hands of the IT team – the only users in SAP – who were responsible for adding new fields into the material master, redoing them because of an issue at the front, adapting the programs at the second step, and then finally redeveloping. This became a big roadblock, as solving these daily problems was happening at the same time that Dräger was beginning the migration process to SAP S/4HANA.
To address these ongoing issues, improve operational efficiency, and successfully migrate to SAP S/4HANA Dräger needed an effective data-driven solution. Many other businesses face similar challenges, and according to the latest data integrity research, over half of organizations (57%) have started leveraging cloud-first environments to achieve these goals, with advanced analytics (50%), automation (43%), and digital transformation (42%) all following closely behind.
Industry
Manufacturing
Overview
- Founded in 1889
- Fifth generation family-run business
- Manufacturer of life-saving medical and safety technology products
- 16,000+ employees worldwide
- Present in over 190 countries
Solution
“Deployment of the solution couldn’t have been easier, with the ability to set up new users in just an hour or less.”
Ina Hinckeldeyn IT Consultant, SAP Supply Chain Management and Data Management
The Solution
Dräger turned to Precisely to leverage its Automate Studio Excel-to-SAP solution to simplify and accelerate their journey to SAP S/4HANA. With Automate Studio, Dräger could accelerate complex SAP business processes, enabling them to create new master data and transaction data in SAP systems, update and change mass amounts of data throughout the SAP landscape using Excel and, critically, perform data migration from its existing SAP ERP Central Component (ECC) system to SAP S/4HANA. “We needed to find a way to automate data transfers, and it was important to our users that we focused on ease of use and the ability to leverage Excel to efficiently extract data from our legacy system,” said Hinckeldeyn.
Prior to implementing Studio, the IT department consistently received ad-hoc requests that ranged from “I have to adjust 500 orders,” to “I need to make a change to production bills of materials.” These requests resulted in manual fixes that took time and resources away from the rest of the business. On a larger scale, to complete the conversion, Dräger needed to move from S/4 to Business Partner and had to adapt one million data fields for each Business Partner to ensure authorization down the road. What once would’ve caused hours of work and stress on the team was quickly implemented without any issues thanks to Studio.
“Deployment of the solution couldn’t have been easier, with the ability to set up new users in just an hour or less,” continued Hinckeldeyn. Once Automate Studio was installed into SAP, the migration and S/4HANA conversion was seamless, as Dräger’s system and data remained the same. Additionally, internal training was conducted for new users from different departments, allowing IT to step away from problem-solving and return their focus to development. With more users now trained across the business, one user can resolve these issues day-of, saving time and improving overall efficiency.
Next Steps
Dräger’s partnership with Precisely has been successful in helping the business build a stable foundation, maintaining its position as an industry leader while improving its overall agility. “We couldn’t be more delighted with the results so far and look forward to partnering with Precisely as we drive further transformation and modernization across the business,” shared Hinckeldeyn.
In the future, Dräger plans to incorporate the Automate Studio solution into its software catalog, making it even easier for new users to access the product. It’s also considering the use of Automate Evolve, an automation platform designed to digitize strategic data processes, to further optimize SAP workflows, as well as leveraging the Precisely data integrity portfolio to help ensure trust in the data fueling its most critical systems.
Learn more about Dräger at www.draeger.com
Automate Studio
Automate Studio is the premier Excel-to-SAP solutions platform that enables business users to automate complex SAP business processes and make mass data changes quickly and easily.