How to shrink your SAP decommissioning project

In my previous blog, I explained the checklist for decommissioning SAP. In this blog, I explain how our solution, Archive Central™, simplifies or completely negates those steps. 

WARNING: if you’re here with an upcoming project in mind, you’ll be sending me your credit card details to sign up for our solution at the end of this!

• The archive system won't look like SAP
• Not everything done in SAP today will be done in the archive system
• There will be compromise required

Archive Central has some flexibility in the layout. We can decide how many tabs (‘dashboards’ is the official term) a collection should have, how many widgets should be on each tab, and within those which tables/fields should be shown. This means we can mimic the topography of SAP, but can make it more tailored to the system where the data has come from. 

For a start, Archive Central deactivates any fields with no data so they won’t be available to select. So for the user, it doesn’t look like SAP, but they go to the same places to get the same data, and with less empty fields visible. We can also load pre-configured layouts for SAP from other projects. And there is potentially an advantage – we can combine data in more ways. For example, if there is SAP Employee data and Concur expense data for the same employee, we can show it together. One place to get all the data for a particular object key. Even within a system, we can combine data together. I typically configure Purchase Orders to also have Requisition data, PO Invoices and even the related Accounting Data. My expectation is that any searches will likely be on PO number, not requisition or PO invoice. So no, it doesn’t look like SAP, it’s better!

• You don't need ‘point in time backup’ options, or high availability

We’ve got this covered. We’re leveraging hyperscalers, but we are careful on the Disaster Recovery and point in time recovery choices to make sure we can keep costs down, but still provide an excellent service for decommissioned data access.

• Focus on the use cases not the data in the system
• Preface the conversations with the fact that the current activities in SAP will not all be required when the system is decommissioned. 
  

Our System Analysis report gives us, and you and your teams, excellent visibility of the data in the system, its history and volumes. We can quickly build a worklist of the most common use cases, applicable to the data in the system, for review with your teams. Also because it's Software as a Service (SaaS), we can use statistical analysis of usage of all Archive Central Instances to guide what is actually used by other organisations further down the journey than you. And finally, we have great consultants with experience worldwide, able to speak a plethora of languages, and available to help.

• Will they also be decommissioned?
• Is there data duplication? Which system should the data be taken from?

Archive Central is not only a system for decommissioning SAP. It is the system for decommissioning SAP, but anything specific to SAP is done by our extractors. Archive Central is an efficient, secure SaaS solution where the more systems you decommission the more cost savings you can make. You can bring your own data in csv. files, or our highly skilled project engineers can come and extract data from any system and get it into an easy format to load into Archive Central.

• Documents might not be persisted in the database, or might be stored in a separate repository
• Can documents not persisted be created in the new technology?
• Those in a separate repository: do they come from another system, and is that system being decommissioned? 

From Payslips to W2s to PO Invoices stored in Content Servers, we’ve seen it all. And on the occasions when we haven’t seen it, like Z-reports, we can quickly build an extractor to produce PDFs that can be stored and linked to structured data in SAP.

• Structured data contains a lot of identifiers: 01 = Mrs, 02 = Miss, etc. Are these needed?
• Materials, Purchase Orders, Sales Orders and many others allow the user to enter texts. These are stored in clustered tables and cannot be read directly in the table.

Our SAP extractor elegantly handles the wide array of texts stored in SAP via the STXH/L tables to bring the unpacked text as it was seen in SAP (warts and all!). We also go beyond the application data tables to find the linked configuration tables that allow you to display the order type text or personnel area description rather than the basic code stored in the tables.

• Will someone just need the data, or will they also need the change history from the data?

Yep, you guessed it. We can take the change documents from CDHDR/CDPOS too. And for HR we have an extractor for the PCL4 short-term and long-term audit trail.

• Include in the blueprint the process if something were to be missed. This may help dictate how much/little an area chooses to take. 
• Do this EARLY in the project, it helps everything!

We can bring experience and best practice from many projects like the one you’re facing. We’ve done ‘cliff-edge’ decommissioning where access to the data stops abruptly as part of an acquisition, and we’ve done more sedate projects where the system can be phased out over time.

• The level of testing should be proportionate to the cost for temporarily bringing the system up again.

We encourage the validation to focus on the things that may be unusual about this specific SAP system; areas where the system is known to have been heavily modified or use an third-party add-on. We can spot this from our System Analysis reports. Also knowing the usage of all our other clients can help to focus the testing on the most commonly used data types.

• Market your solution internally for other system decommissioning. 
• Regardless of what you're using, the cost ROI is better the more systems you can put in it.
• Plan for other systems joining later on in considering permissions, expected space/compute, etc.

Everything about Archive Central, from its architecture, to the pricing model, to the support our account executives provide, is geared towards making Archive Central the only decommissioning solution your organisation will need. We have many examples of other technologies already having their data decommissioned in Archive Central.

• Remove access to SAP and track any requests to access it again.

With experience on decommissioning projects across a wide variety of industries and in depth SAP landscape management knowledge in our organisation, we can guide and advise on the right phases of transitioning to Archive Central for all historic data queries.

• Check your SAP licences – can you keep the system display only, even after maintenance has ended?

Things can be missed. The business users are busy with the project implementing new software. We can advise on the right risk/effort balance, but if more data needs to be extracted after the fact, it's very easy to use our SAP extractor to top up Archive Central with the missing piece.

• Include workshops with internal AND external auditors

We’re probably the only people in the world actively seeking out the auditors. We want to talk to them early in the project to help ensure there are no surprises down the line. Where there are challenges, we can share experience of working with other auditors – both internal and external – on similar projects, and help to ensure a pragmatic approach everyone can buy into.

Our final tip is to contact us for a demo of Archive Central today - you won’t regret it!