Case Study: Heidelberg University Hospital achieves near-zero downtime system upgrades with SAP Minimized Downtime Service

Achieving Comprehensive System Upgrades with Minimal Downtime

Heidelberg University Hospital, a major healthcare provider, faced the challenge of upgrading two SAP ERP applications and converting them to Unicode. The process was estimated to require 54 hours of system downtime, which was unacceptable for the hospital's critical operations. To overcome this, they turned to SAP and its minimized downtime service.

Using this service, SAP performed the complex upgrade and conversion on a cloned system while the hospital's production system remained largely operational. The project was completed successfully in just six months, with the final system changeover requiring only 10 hours of downtime instead of the original 54-hour estimate. This minimal downtime, achieved by SAP, allowed the hospital to maintain its operations and established the technical foundation for future plans to implement the SAP HANA platform.

Heidelberg University Hospital

Günter Grüber

Department Manager for Administrative Applications