DRÄXLMAIER Group GmbH

With the Synapsis program, DRÄXLMAIER Group set the course early for a globally integrated SAP S/4HANA landscape. The start was deliberately designed for speed and flexibility: new systems were built in parallel with the existing in-house operations to accelerate the transformation program. As business relevance grew, so did the requirements for stability, availability and scalability. Together with Manage Now, this evolved step by step into a professional operating model: from 1st Generation Outsourcing through migration to the ServiceHub and on to today’s support for SAP S/4HANA RISE.

Challenges

The initial situation at DRÄXLMAIER was demanding—and for that reason typical of large transformation programs. Business-critical legacy SAP systems were running in-house in the company’s own data centers, while Synapsis was creating a new S/4HANA world, initially built on AWS to ensure speed and flexibility for the greenfield approach. This setup made sense for the early project phase, but it was not designed for permanently business-critical operations with clear SLAs, resilient backup and recovery structures, and 24/7 services. The organizational dimension added further complexity: the internal SAP Basis team could not operate a landscape of this scale on a permanent basis. As the rollout progressed, the number of systems grew sharply, with correspondingly increasing requirements for high availability, scaling and economically predictable operations. For DRÄXLMAIER, the issue went beyond hosting; it was about how to transition a highly dynamic transformation landscape into stable regular operations without losing speed and flexibility.

Solution

Manage Now took over the existing landscape and supportedDRÄXLMAIER through several stages of maturity.The first decisive step was to professionalize what had until then been a divided world: the existing ECC systems were migrated from the customer-owned data centers, while the new Synapsis/S/4HANA systems were transferred from AWS into the Manage Now environment. As part of the 1st Generation Outsourcing, this created a consolidated SAP platform that brought both the legacy environment and the new S/4HANA landscape together in a stable, SLA-based operating model. This established the foundation, and the platform could be continuously enhanced in line with the Synapsis program. Manage Now supported both stable operations and the momentum of the global rollout, for example through rapid provisioning of new systems, automated system copies, and additional services such as output management, job scheduling and archiving operations. With the contract extension in 2023, the next evolutionary stage followed: the migration of more than 85 SAP systems to the ServiceHub in Frankfurt. Today, Manage Now is supporting the next target architecture and assisting DRÄXLMAIER Group with the transition toward SAP S/4HANA RISE. Individual systems remain in the existing operating model, resulting in a deliberately hybrid target picture.

Results

The collaboration between DRÄXLMAIER and Manage Now cannot be reduced to a single project milestone. Its value lies instead in the fact that a highly dynamic SAP transformation has been stabilized, scaled and further developed over many years. A heterogeneous starting point became a resilient operating model capable of supporting both the requirements of the ongoing rollout and the next target architecture. Continuity is especially relevant here: Manage Now not only successfully completed an initial migration, but also accompanied the customer through the next major transition into the ServiceHub and remains involved today in the further evolution toward RISE. This ability to support several transformation stages in an operationally secure and technologically robust way is the real added value of the collaboration.

Why Manage Now

DRÄXLMAIER has traditionally maintained a high level of IT vertical integration and assigns critical services to external partners only selectively. That makes this collaboration particularly meaningful. The decisive factor was not a single technology component, but the ability to transition a highly dynamic transformation program into resilient regular operations and to continue developing it through several evolutionary stages. Manage Now first created the bridge between in-house operations and the AWS build, then implemented industrialization in the ServiceHub and today supports the next stage of development toward RISE. This continuity, combined with technical depth, implementation strength and resilient delivery, is the real differentiator.