Lufthansa Industry Solutions Consolidates Client SAP Estates Into Global Templates

Lufthansa Industry Solutions works as an SAP partner that consolidates fragmented client SAP estates into harmonized, internationally standardized structures. It places consolidation and harmonization of existing environments in its portfolio next to SAP S/4HANA and SAP Cloud Platform implementation. The firm, known as LHIND, is the IT consulting and digital transformation unit of the Lufthansa Group, and it named Rainer Liebhart Managing Director as of May 1, 2026.

Why Fragmented SAP Estates Accumulate

Two decades of running business processes on SAP has, at many companies, produced heterogeneous system landscapes and legacy applications that built up as regional units adapted the software to local needs. Parallel systems raise maintenance cost and complicate any change that has to reach across the enterprise, and that condition drives clients toward consolidation and, in cloud-oriented cases, migration.

How the Global Template Works

The consolidation mechanism centers on a global template. For international roll-outs, LHIND follows a three-step sequence: analyze location-specific requirements across the target markets, build an SAP-based template that holds for every country and serves as a global standard, and execute the roll-out site by site. The template embeds country-specific tax rules and legal differences, so individual regions inherit a common process design instead of building their own. The roll-out can span years and has to account for time zones and differing working methods, after which a stabilization phase absorbs changes such as new legal guidelines.

A governed template also relocates process authority. Control of core process definitions moves to a central design authority, and regional sites gain a defined path for legitimate local variation, such as tax treatment, rather than maintaining independent applications. The operational effect is a smaller application footprint and a single data store for transactions that previously ran in separate regional systems.

Hamburg Süd’s GLOBE Program at Scale

The Hamburg Süd program shows the model in production. The container carrier, part of the Maersk group since 2017, launched an enterprise program called GLOBE to replace a landscape where more than 6,000 users across regions ran over 50 applications with overlapping purposes and heavy maintenance. GLOBE is a centralized, integrated, and component-based carrier system, and LHIND integrated processes from offer preparation through contract management and order handling into a globally deployed system with central data storage.

LHIND’s role on GLOBE covered the full life cycle, including planning and project management, architectural design, development and test, worldwide rollout, production support, and a technology update into the cloud. The engagement also changed how Hamburg Süd built software, shifting from a “specify and build” model toward “inspect and adapt” with iteratively deployable products and agile full-stack teams. A dedicated rollout team applied region-specific support and temporary hypercare to manage the move from decentralized to centralized IT, an organizational control that let the program go live region by region rather than in one cutover.

The documentation layer got the same treatment. A separate module, GDoc, handles bill of lading creation on a microservices architecture built as a cloud-native Spring Boot application, interfacing with the other GLOBE modules to complete a flow that spans master data, schedules, equipment, sales, booking, and documentation. “LHIND successfully supported in creating an IT system that enabled us to centrally provide and process our highly flexible product range,” said Michael Henkel, Program Manager IT at Hamburg Süd.

What Determines Whether Consolidation Holds

For enterprises weighing SAP consolidation, the LHIND approach frames the work as a multi-year process and organizational program rather than a software swap. The evidence covers template design, phased regional roll-out, and long-term application management, and it points to the governance and change-management structures, including a central design authority, rollout teams, and hypercare, that decide whether a consolidation holds once regional systems are retired.

What This Means for SAPinsiders

• Consolidation becomes a permanent governance capability. Once regional systems disappear, exception handling, template ownership, and release decisions cannot revert to temporary project teams. Companies need an enduring operating model, or local workarounds will gradually recreate the fragmentation they removed.
• Template quality determines the economics of future change. A disciplined global template lowers the cost of upgrades, acquisitions, and regulatory changes by providing a common process baseline. A weak template merely centralizes complexity and makes every subsequent change enterprise-wide.
• Each rollout wave should improve the next. Phased deployment creates a learning system only when defects, adoption data, and regional exceptions feed back into the template. Without that loop, local fixes accumulate and the standardized landscape begins diverging again.