A few weeks ago I delivered a webinar for our Africa Middle East region on decommissioning SAP with Archive Central. Excitingly, it was the first time we’d showcased the direct transfer of data from SAP to Archive Central via a web service (HTTPS). It was also quite an-in depth view of both Archive Central and the SAP Archive Extractor technology. If you missed it, you can watch it here.
In a longer webinar like this, we use polls to keep everyone engaged and garner feedback on the subject that might help us to understand what organisations are experiencing and looking for from their partners. In this short blog, I examine the two questions we asked, and the feedback we received.
I actually expected Greenfield S/4HANA to be a higher proportion of the responses from our attendees. The reason I expected this is because of a trend I’m seeing across lots of ERP vendors, not just SAP. The ubiquitous journey to the cloud means many ‘legacy’ systems are being replaced. Due to the age of those systems, they probably don’t align completely to the business structures, and their limitations might have been keeping business users hostage to sub-optimal processes for some time.
Whatever new cloud system is being implemented, including S/4HANA, the partners providing advisory services will be championing a clean slate and adapting the business processes while ensuring the enterprise structure is now correctly aligned with the business. In this situation, legacy data can really hold you back. Only taking (and potentially transforming) master data that is required is much simpler than trying to adapt and retrofit historical data to the new system. So sunsetting the old data with the system would be a great motivation for people interested in our Archive Central product.
In a previous blog, I talked about some of the hidden costs of maintaining display-only SAP systems, and we’ve helped a few organisations that were doing so. So it was no surprise to see ‘Expensive to maintain’ being a popular answer.
I realise now that my choice of available answers did rather stack the cards towards a privacy theme, but I’m not surprised that the leading answer was privacy and compliance related. I was involved in the development, and more intensely the roll out, of our Data Privacy Suite for SAP solutions, and heard first hand how the historical data lying in SAP systems was a minefield no one particularly wanted to step into unless they absolutely had to. The moment you start decommissioning systems, you’re faced with the question ‘but do we really need that data?’ and ‘what, all of it?’. In the past it was simple to state the financial compliance reasons not to jettison any of the data, but now you must look type-by-type at the legal grounds for holding it.
On the Archive Extractor side, we can help by:
- being incredibly selective on what data to bring
- redacting or removing specific values during the data extraction (e.g. date of birth or government ID number) if they are not required
And within Archive Central, we can apply retention rules based on any fields within the data model, with the capability of:
- removing the entire object key (e.g. all data for an employee)
- removing all data from one table for any keys that now meet the retention criteria
- clearing or redacting specific fields within tables when the key meets the criteria
The switching off of the old system will never be anyone's priority in these massively important projects, but it's never too soon to get a plan in place, and can be one less thing to worry about. Our technology leverages our Intellectual Property (IP) based on many years of experience to ensure we don’t need lots of input from the business users. We know what to get and how to get it, and we know how the users will want to view it. Our System Analysis reports can also give an early synopsis of what data might be in scope, and indeed how customised the SAP system may have been.
By the way… If you need help extracting and transforming some of the data for the new system, we can also help you with that!
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