Commerz Real: Boosting business agility and enabling innovation with faster performance and increased resiliency
Creating a reliable, standardized ERP foundation with SAP
Commerz Real AG is an asset manager with €35 billion under management. With a focus on sustainability and renewable energy, the company wanted to maximize its own business efficiency. By combining the RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition solution, SAP Datasphere, and SAP Analytics Cloud, Commerz Real aims to generate new insights in real time.
| Industry | Region | Company Size | Partner |
| Real Estate | Wiesbaden, Germany | 800 employees | Microsoft |
Cost saving for mission-critical applications
Faster analytics performance
Faster approval of new app proposals within just 3 minutes
Head of Architecture & Data, Commerz Real AG
Creating a foundation for growth
Asset manager Commerz Real employs 800 people across 23 offices in six countries in Europe and the US. Headquartered in Wiesbaden, Germany, the company manages assets with over 4,000 tenants in 19 countries around the world.
Eager to increase operational efficiency and harness intelligent analytics to develop its business, Commerz Real looked to move its business applications into a fully managed cloud model. Nils Krugmann, Head of Architecture & Data at Commerz Real AG, says: “Running business applications was expensive, and our highly customized and complex configuration was slowing us down. To continue growing our business cost-effectively, we needed simple, scalable, and reliable processes that would enable digital innovation on all levels.”
After the company experienced reliability issues and outages of critical systems managed by an external IT service provider, Commerz Real knew that it had to make radical changes to take the business to the next level. “We tried traditional managed services, and that approach simply did not deliver the benefits we were looking for,” confirms Nils Krugmann. “The partner was not committed to delivering the service quality we were promised, so we set out to find a better match for our business needs about nine months before our contract ended.”
As almost every transformation project touches IT systems and data, Commerz Real understood that a stable, standardized foundation for app development and deployment was essential to deliver AI innovation and process agility in a dynamic business environment.
Head of Architecture & Data, Commerz Real AG
Delivering cloud innovation
Commerz Real evaluated various models and vendors before selecting the RISE with SAP offering that includes the SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition solution. The company now relies on Microsoft Azure to run its SAP solutions. RISE with SAP includes comprehensive managed cloud services and security from a dedicated SAP team committed to continuously optimizing the cloud infrastructure.
Working closely with SAP, Commerz Real moved its SAP S/4HANA application for treasury management as well as its SAP ERP application (with SAP HANA Live for Flexible Real Estate Management offerings) for 900 users into the cloud and migrated all databases to SAP HANA. “We needed to act fast to complete the migration with SAP on time to cancel our existing managed hosting contract,” adds Nils Krugmann. “To achieve this within just six to nine months, we followed the lean core philosophy, prioritizing the most important 80% of features to make quick progress, leaving the remaining 20% to optimize later. Timing was critical, as a delay would have cost us over €1 million.”
Thanks to the close collaboration between the SAP project team, Account Executive, and Customer Success Managers, Commerz Real completed the migration on time. The Specialized Customer Success Manager brought expert knowledge to oversee the SAP Business Technology Platform implementation, which comprises solutions spanning databases, data management, analytics, application development and integration in combination with intelligent technologies. The Enterprise Customer Success Manager provided a comprehensive overview of all the solutions, coordinating technology adoption and supporting efficient usage with guidance and support. The contribution of all the SAP teams was invaluable to ensure that Commerz Real achieved its objectives and can enjoy the full value of its investment. As a result of these joint efforts, Commerz Real now benefits from a standardized, high-availability solution hosted across two cloud regions in Frankfurt and Dublin.
With SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition, Commerz Real has now faster access to innovative new features and can use more built-in standard processes. The company plans to make use of the intuitive user interfaces provided by SAP Fiori apps and replace manual spreadsheet and email workflows with integrated business processes. This will enable quicker data validation and consolidation, increasing data quality and boosting business analytics and reporting.
Head of Architecture & Data, Commerz Real AG
Cutting costs, boosting business continuity, and strengthening compliance
By choosing the RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition solution, Commerz Real is saving 25% in costs over three to five years for its mission-critical IT services that drive the business. The company also benefits from reliable and tested business continuity processes.
“Before we moved to the SAP cloud solution, we had a highly customized and complex environment,” says Nils Krugmann. “Every time we did disaster testing, we discovered something that needed to be improved and it always took us a week or two to get everything sorted. The highly standardized and mature deployment of the RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition solution minimizes our business risk, because failover tests just work seamlessly every time. This gives us confidence that the RISE with SAP S/4HANA Private Cloud Edition solution is the right model for us.”
Additionally, the SAP solution also simplifies compliance and accelerates audits with a wide range of certifications out of the box. “In the past, auditors sometimes highlighted in their reports that we should strengthen our security information and event management—SIEM for short,” adds Nils Krugmann. “Now with the RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition solution, we get top marks.”
The move into the cloud has also substantially improved the application performance. “We’ve seen a significant improvement for data analytics and reporting processes,” confirms Nils Krugmann. “Data loading jobs run 60% faster now. This makes it easier for us to reliably submit daily mandatory valuation and risk reports to regulation authorities.”
With the implementation of its cloud strategy, many of the company’s systems—including SAP—are now running on Microsoft Azure, making the integration of key business data with other processes and applications much faster and easier. “Standing on the shoulders of two strong partners, SAP and Microsoft, gives us more flexibility to innovate,” says Nils Krugmann. “We can leverage our SAP business data more dynamically. For example, we can easily provide quick access to business departments who can then independently develop new analytics tools and reports to supercharge the business.”
Commerz Real has become an innovator and pioneer within the wider group by adopting the RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition solution. “The central corporate SAP team and the architecture management board now invite me to their meetings and collaborate more closely with us,” summarizes Nils Krugmann. “We get more visibility across the group and can share our experiences with new solutions more widely to help the group modernize and adopt new technologies more effectively.”
Head of Architecture & Data, Commerz Real AG
Modernizing data analytics and standardizing application development
Building on the RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition solution, Commerz Real plans to modernize, optimize, and consolidate data analytics with the SAP Datasphere and SAP Analytics Cloud. “Our goal is to massively streamline our entire data analytics landscape,” says Nils Krugmann. “We want to use the latest tools to create a new business data fabric that integrates up to 40 separate repositories to provide a central information backbone for the business. We will be able to make relevant data easily accessible to our business teams. This will enable entirely new self-service reporting capabilities in combination with SAP Analytics Cloud. Ultimately, we want to deliver real-time insights by replacing static reports and presentations with integrated data stories and dashboards.”
Commerz Real also aims to standardize and automate application development and deployment with SAP Business Technology Platform, a mix of proven and broadly adopted open source and SAP technologies. SAP Build will help reduce the sprawling number of applications and platforms and establish optimized best practices. “When teams want to use a specific platform, we have to evaluate and assess the entire stack to ensure compliance and security,” explains Nils Krugmann. “The full process can easily take over three months due to approval workflows. By creating apps on SAP Business Technology Platform, I can new sign off new proposals within three minutes, because the technology stack is already pre-approved. This new agility will allow us to move faster and create new apps rapidly using no-code and low-code tools, changing our business culture by enabling more citizen developers to be creative and more productive.”
The company has already worked with SAP Consulting to develop a proof of concept for new environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) dashboards and integrations. “Our business users have been very impressed with the first results, and we are keen to use the SAP Sustainability Control Tower solution to track and manage our sustainability goals at scale,” says Nils Krugmann.
Looking ahead, Commerz Real will evaluate cutting-edge GenAI solutions such as the Joule copilot to remove barriers and give more people the means to use business data in more ways. In combination with SAP SuccessFactors or SAP Analytics Cloud, business users could simply ask for reports using natural language and get results instantly, instead of relying on specialized IT staff and business consultants to develop custom reports, which can often take two to three weeks and slow down momentum.
Nils Krugmann concludes: “The RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition solution opens up many new opportunities for us to level up our business. With all the new capabilities, we aim to become much more productive and double the assets under management while maintaining the team size.”
Featured partner
Microsoft is a leading global technology partner with over 221,000 employees worldwide and annual revenues of US$211 billion. The rapidly growing Azure cloud platform is the solid foundation for RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud on Microsoft Cloud.