A clean Start into the digital Future

Milestone achieved: With the transition to SAP S/4HANA, the family-owned company Werner & Mertz has set the course for its digital future. The company opted for a brownfield migration. The goal: to ensure seamless continuation of business operations and to lay the foundation for future innovations. Thanks to the strong commitment of its employees and consolut’s expertise, this goal was achieved — and more.

In a preliminary project, consolut analyzed the status quo of the existing SAP systems in order to define the optimal migration strategy together with Werner & Mertz. As the existing processes were well established and running stably, a brownfield approach was selected. A subsequent objective was to harmonize the processes of both business units and consolidate them on a shared SAP S/4HANA platform.

consolut steuerte das Migrationsprojekt mit ihrer Prisma-Methodik. Diese baut auf dem SAP Activate-Modell auf, das consolut anhand eigener Praxiserfahrungen auf verschiedene S/4HANA-Projekte zugeschnitten hat. Ein zentraler Bestandteil war eine detaillierte Roadmap. Damit hatten alle Projektbeteiligten jederzeit den Überblick über den Projektstatus und wussten, was als Nächstes zu tun war. Das sorgte für klare Entscheidungen und zügigen Fortschritt.

To reduce the complexity of the project, the project team jointly structured the migration preparation into subprojects, such as the introduction of Business Partner, the cleanup of legacy programs, and the transition to Adobe forms. One central challenge was that certain technical functions are no longer available in SAP S/4HANA in the same way as before. In many cases, they now rely on new tables and data structures that did not exist in the legacy system. These changes required new solution approaches to ensure that existing processes continued to run smoothly—particularly in reporting, which now accesses different data sources.

The open and constructive exchange between the project teams at consolut and Werner & Mertz, along with the strong commitment on the customer side, was crucial in overcoming obstacles without any loss of time.

Twelve months after the kick-off, the system was ready for go-live. More than 1,000 test cases had been completed, 109 acceptance protocols signed, and six test migrations successfully carried out before SAP S/4HANA went live. The go-live was supported by consolut and around 50 employees from Werner & Mertz and was completed without disruption during a production-free weekend.

Since then, Werner & Mertz has been operating on SAP S/4HANA Cloud, Private Edition, hosted by consolut on Microsoft Azure. This provides the foundation for managing processes even more intelligently in the future and increasing value creation through the use of new technologies.

With its deep functional expertise, the team at Werner & Mertz made a significant contribution to the success of the project. consolut assumed the role of a guide, ensuring that the company was able to manage the complexity of the digital transformation initiative and that the migration was completed smoothly from a technical perspective.

Energized by the project’s success, preparations are already underway to migrate the second business unit to SAP S/4HANA as well and to seamlessly continue the transformation journey with consolut’s expertise in data migration. The planned carve‑in project underscores Werner & Mertz’s ambition: to remain at the forefront of innovation—not only with its product portfolio, but also digitally.