Archive Central: Mastering SAP data with strategic decommissioning

Hello, everyone, and welcome. Thank you so much for joining us today. My name is Maria Robinson, and I'm the head of marketing and alliance for Europe here at EPI-USE Labs. And I'm really pleased you to welcome to today's webinar, mastering SAP data with strategic decommissioning with Archive Central. Just before we get started, a couple of housekeeping points. Everyone's lines will be muted during the session just to avoid any background noise, but please do pop any questions you might have in the question box as we go along. We got quite a lot to cover today so we might not get to answer the questions live, but we will make sure to follow-up via email afterwards. So for everyone who's less familiar with EPI's Labs, we are a global company. We provide software solutions and manage services, custom innovations with a strong focus on SAP landscape transformation. We work with your clients to improve the performance, management, and security of their SAP and SAP SuccessFactors systems, and we also help them to make the most of AI driven opportunities as Today, we are going to talk about how organizations can get better control of their legacy SAP data, and I think it's worth talking about why this topic matters. A lot of organization are still running legacy systems, and they require a lot of budget, infrastructure, and support to keep them going. And, of course, those system often contain years of important business data. You can't just switch them off and forget about it because they must still be needed for audit, compliance, tax, and just for future reference. Also, move into the cloud, it's no longer realistic to assume that you can just take everything and keep it in an active environment because data volumes affect migration effort, the storage, performance, and ongoing costs. So today, we are talking about strategic data commission decommissioning, and we'll focus on the two key steps of the journey, the extracting the data properly so they can keep their business context and the decommissioning of the legacy system safely and as well in a way that is accessible. Before I hand over, to Michael, let me quickly introduce, our presenter. So Michael Webb is a product delivery consultant here at EPI-USE Labs with over twenty years of experience in solution consulting. For the last few years, he's been focused specifically on SAP system decommissioning and legacy data migration. So without further ado, I'll just hand it over to you, Michael. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Maria. Good morning, all. As Maria said, we had to talk about Archive Central and Archive Extractor today. So the challenges that we find in organizations moving to the cloud or just with their legacy data is the legacy data trap. We're finding that customers are spending a lot of effort and resources maintaining old systems, running into issues around new hardware, security patching, and just protecting their data. They've tried to exit and have all their legacy systems and just haven't got it right, incomplete extractions, or the data is sitting there and they're not able to actually use it correctly. In the European organizations, we're seeing about eighty percent of their budgets going towards actually maintaining legacy systems and effort. With SAP, it's never an easy path to get data out of SAP, but it's with your structures, especially around trusted tables. And what we've seen a lot in the market as well is vulnerabilities and support. Refining systems are becoming more and more vulnerable the older and older they get, falling out of patching or just the hardware itself becoming unmaintainable. Around audit and compliance as well, it just sits there, the system gets old, doesn't get used, and when it's needed, someone doesn't have a password, or they don't know where to get it, or there's no one who actually stands the system. As we said, the scenarios we're finding with our clients that are using Archive Central is they're looking for options to reduce their license support and infrastructure, the cost of maintaining and sunsetting those systems. Even moving out or selling parts of their business, they're looking for solutions where we can extract the data and give the data to the selling or buying side without having to give access to their systems. Or they're moving to new systems, moving away from SAP, or moving to S4HANA greenfield. And that's where Archive Central and Archive Extractors come in quite nice to play. So what is strategic decommissioning? It's taking your data securely from your legacy system here, putting it into an environment where you can meet your business critical data needs and be compliant and have a cost effective solution. In short, it's managing your data smarter in the cloud environments. So we've had a discussion lots of times with our customers who said they've tried the raw just to extract the data, and what we have found is why is it failing all the time. SAP systems and even non SAP systems are very complex systems. Extracting everything from a raw table could be standard on most functions, but then you run into more complex tables, especially around your payroll and your finance, where we've got clustered data. You would need to extract all of that data in one go. Problem is you then need to try and make that cluster data meaningful again. SAP also relies on very complex internal relationships. You have to dive down deep into other logic. Your standard bulk extracts that leave behind highly fragmented information and tables, and you're not getting everything. So you have to review and go and do multiple extractions, and this takes time. Doing it bespoke or doing it in the back end is complex. You're spending more time and resources and longer project timelines to get your data out into a readable format. So all the problems I've been shown to you, so what's the solution? So at EPI-USE Labs, we have two different approaches to what we can do. So from an SAP ABAP point of view, S3 or R3 or older, we've got our extractor, and we've mapped the data objects for the last thirty five plus years. For non SAP systems, we've built custom extractors from there to get the data out, and they're both presented back into Archive Central. So moving on to Archive Extractor, we'll focus on that first because that's where our real power lies, is the Extractor solution is business object generated. So what does that mean? We actually look at the object. Instead of looking at table level and doing table level copies, we look at the whole object itself, making sure that we're getting all the relevant information when we're extracting the data. So there is no fragmentation across the data. If we go and extract a business partner, we make sure we get all the information relating to that business partner. If we go and extract an accounting code, that making sure all the relevant information links back up correctly. Archive Extractor preserves the integrity and relationships of that data. Be it complex cluster tables or joins, it goes and gets all the related data. Rather than treating each object or each table as independent, it goes and makes sure that all that relationships are kept. We automatically handle declustering of the tables to make it more readable and understandable for our end users. Each table within a clustered table gets its own dedicated table that we extract to. This makes reporting a lot easier, makes finding information a lot easier. It makes understanding the data a lot easier in Archive Central. We can do extraction at a very fine level, as we said, at a carve out level, certain company codes or at a certain cost center or profit center, or we can do our full system approach where we can take the whole system across to Archive Central. Our Business Object Workbench and Archive Extractor, which is built on top of that, it is powerful. It's three thousand odd plus objects that we have documented and understood from SAP environment. We've got thirty five years of production knowledge sitting there with over eight hundred clients using it daily. We've issued over five thousand licenses and carry on doing that. Extracting non ABAP systems are still possible with Archive Center. We just apply a different logic. Over the years, we've built custom extractors for systems like SuccessFactors, IFS, Workday, and etcetera. If a new system comes on, we've got a dedicated custom development team that works with us to actually extract the data in a readable format that can be ingested into Archive Central. Or we have client led approaches. If you can get the data out, we can ingest it. Archive Central is an agnostic solution. It is not bound by a certain solution. We can take any data and present it into Archive Central. I'm gonna jump into Archive Central now and Archive Extractor and just show you how we do it. So with archive extractor, it is built on ABAP code, so it's in within your SAP system. We're using standard SAP objects to do the work and extend it out. Within there, we can jump into the extractor itself, and what it does, it presents us with all the available objects in that system. If we go and look at, let's say, the human resource object, and we look at master data, and we look at the employee, we can actually go and slice the data quite a fine margin on this. All of these selection opportunities allow us to slice the data even further than we need to. We also look at integration points. So what we mean by integration points is where the data is shared, where does the data get touched, where is that data used within your SAP system. As well, we've got data groups for this data that's linked, so it's important information that comes part of that data. So I'm just going to select one employee here just to show you how we can actually display the information. So I'm just going to select one employee for now. I'm just going to select customer, functional area that they belong to. As you can see, I can go down even deeper her object itself. So at the customer level, I've got additional objects I can go and look at from that aspect, as well as I'm going to look at the functional area from that aspect. Once I've got the information selected that I want to do for my extraction, I can select preview. This will actually show me all the related data that we've selected. So at starting at the highest object, which is the main object, we've got the employee. If we extend, we've then got the central contact person that's created in SAP, and then we've got the employee from that. Can actually drill down and actually see that information that I'm about to extract from there, that all that information is visible to me. We can also do redaction. So if there's certain information that doesn't need to go over to the legacy system, we can actually go and redact certain information during the archive run as well. Just going back to my archives extractor quickly, and I'd like to show you around logistics. So sales and distribution, if we go to master data, we can get the full master data as well. And if we look at transactional, I'm gonna go into billing document. And if we look at this billing document here, yet again, we can go and select things. So I can also do proceeding documents from that and subsequent documents, anything that goes forward from that aspect. I can do all of that. I'm gonna go select my preview again. This shows me all the information. So it will show me the relevant document, the delivery, translate, goods, receipts, small movements, customer details. Yet again, I can drill through on that information. So as we go through the project, we will actually extract multiple runs of that data going down and extracting it. How we get it across to Archive Central? We've got two ways we can get it across. We can either do it via HTTPS, which is using an RFC connection, which then pushes it directly into Archive Central, Or we can do a file export in a certain file moment that gets ported locally and then transferred over SFTP. I've already done a run today just to save a bit of time. I'm just gonna go back too quickly. So for this run, I did a run today this morning for a billing document. I can show you what the document we create a full audit history of it so we know exactly what we've extracted, how many records we extract. Same document that I showed you earlier, there's all the information that's being selected from that aspect. I executed it by HTTPS, and that went directly into Archive Central. What we can get from this information as well is we can actually get all the relevant information from a detailed perspective of what we've covered. So we can see the object tree that was extracted. These are all the items that were extracted for that object. We can look at the statistics, how many records were actually extracted per object. So you can see, for the main address, we had three objects with a total of fifteen rows that were exported to Archive Central. Jumping into Archive Central. This is Archive Central. It is a web based solution built in HTML5. It is fully customizable. We make it look exactly how every customer wants it. We can change and add stuff. We can also change the branding for the customers to make it more compliant to the branding standards that they have. Once the data is sent across, it comes into Archive Central. From here, you can see this is the one I ran this morning. It then brings in all the information. And besides just bringing in all the information, it creates all the it checks for duplicates so that we're not duplicating information. It configures the collections, which is just a fancy word for an object, and it builds all the associations automatically, all built from what we've extracted. So there's no need for us to go manually and relink everything. It is all done as we import the data. If I go look at the data now, I can go into my workspace. Each system can get their own workspace, or we can set it up into module perspective. So what we see here, we see the module finance, HR, and sales and distribution, or we've got systems. So we've got ED200, which is a SAP system, we've got IFS, and we've got SuccessFactors, each one presented and locked down to that relevant information. We're able to provide security roles at that level so that it locks it down that no one can see the information. If you are in HR, you will only see HR. If you're in finance, you'll only see finance. If you're a dual role, we can give you access to multiple aspects of their system. Jumping into ED2, that's where I was earlier. This one here is a system, so we can also subdivide it. So here you have your overview screen with all the information. You've got your finance module, yet again, all roles driven. Material management, human capital, project systems, and sales and distribution. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to go look for that document that I sent across. So there's the document I sent across this morning. This is all searchable, any fields from this. The user can add their own fields automatically. So just by going add, are presented with all the fields that they can see. And this is at a user level, so there's no need for developers to go and add new fields or new filtering. From the field adding, yet again, a user can actually customize what they want to see just by clicking add column and doing it from that aspect. We can also do what we call views. So once a user has their view that they want, they can actually save it. So create a saved view, give it a name, and they can keep it to themselves, or they can share it with the rest of their colleagues. Going back to that document I brought in, if I click on that, what it will show me there is the object I brought in. If I click in, it gives me all the information from that one. As part of the project, we make this look as close as possible. We do understand that not all SAP systems are vanilla. We do understand that there are custom fields that you have put on your environment. We'll make sure that sits there and looks as close as possible to the SAP system. So from here, can see all the information that's extracted. We can see the billing document, the payer, the billing date. From a document flow perspective, we can then see all the subsequent documents and any preceding documents. So there we've got the sales preceding document was the sales and second being the financial posting, if there was one. All that information sits there. We're able to actually put in drill downs back in. So from here, a user can drill directly to that sales document, which gives you that information, as well as the document flow. All that information is linked as what we exported from SAP. Going back into Archive Central, yet again, giving you full access from that way. What I'd like to show you now is how we manage clustering data, and the best one to show you how we manage clustering data is actually the HR object. So here I'm in my human capital management. I've got some couple of views down here, employees, country by birth. We can do simple reporting from the archive central. Though we don't have the SAP runtime, we can create quite complex reporting by linking additional tables in the system to bring out that reporting that you're requiring. From here, you can actually drill down even further. So for Germany, I've got twenty seven candidates. I can drill down, and it will show me that information from there. I can drill down even further, where I can drill down into the actual employee, and that gives me that employee. As I mentioned earlier, part of the extraction is the declustering. We're able to actually decluster info types, so you've got all the info types that you see over here are declustered at runtime. We can also redact information at certain levels or driven by roles. So if you can't see certain information, be it identity numbers or bank account numbers, we can redact it. If you don't have the rights, you won't see it. If you do have the rights, you can actually see the information by clicking on it. Moving into pay information. We know pay data in SAP is quite complex. So here we have the pay history with an attachment. Archive Central can actually handle the attachments from the SAP system, marrying back the actual document to the original record. So here I've got the payslip, but what I can do actually more is actually drill down into the pay history. So if I take this one here, I can drill down, and then this gives me my full overview of that payslip. It gives me my results table per wage type. It gives me the cumulative results, payment tables, all of that. Even your custom info types are brought in here, and we can marry them back to the record. From attachments, we can actually click on the attachment, and this is generated directly out of SAP. So from an audit requirement, if you need to provide any accounting documents or tax documents, it is actually linked at that document from there. The user can then view it and even download it and send it to you. Therefore, they can share with other people or auditors. From a security perspective, we are GDP and other data privacy compliant. We're SOC two and ISO compliant. And from an audit history, we track all activities within the system, giving you a full value of what actually happens in the system, who, when, and where. Fully compliant with InfoCheck requirements from that aspect. Just wait for the company back while everyone's will go there. It's going from a roles perspective. We build roles with you where we can create certain roles at quite a finite level. We can go all the way down to field level and use certain field values to or to detect information from people's view. Going back to the order tracking, as you can see, it tracks exactly what I've done. What have I been doing? What have I been viewing? If I downloaded any data from that aspect as well. All information is tracked, which can be exported and searched for at any stage. Quickly going to jump back into the slides because I am conscious of the time. So how we deliver a project is quite straightforward. We pride ourselves on a very low touch methodology. We have a report that we run. We offer free of charge to all our customers and potential customers, which we can run on your SAP environment. It's our analysis report. It gives us a view of the footprint of your system. No PII data is sent in that report. It's purely metadata. It tells us what objects, how big, and what you're actually currently using in your system. We compare the findings across our client database with other projects that we know. We've done multiple industries in Archive Central, and we know how to deliver it according to your industry. We then do workshops with the stakeholders, and then we go away and start extracting. We come back to you, and then we have additional touch points where we do UAT, and then finally we extract the full data and go live. From a non SAP system, we approach it in the same way. Without running our system analysis support, we will work with you to understand your environment and what type of database and system and how we can get the data out and then how we can consume it. Yet again, we do discovery workshops to understand the data and how we can map it together from that aspect. So we spoke a lot about archive extracted object level. What we also have is a client based approach. And the migration does happen in two different approaches. From an object level, it's for customers that are, A, carving out or want a more finite level of a reduction of their legacy data. They only want to infect certain business objects or they are selling off their system. We've got the client based approach, which is basically take everything in your system. We're still able to slice the data. We can slice it by company code and by periods and all that in the client based approach, but it's more of a one take all. We're not really worried about what we're not taking and what we are taking. We just want everything. And there is some comparison differences. So the migration speed on ObjectSpose is a bit longer, but it is finite and we know exactly what you're getting. Where the client's base is weeks, we just run it, take the data, and import it. Data completeness at object level is fragmented, but it's the data you know want and is needed for your requirements, where client base is everything. From the internal IT effort, it is Medium helping us transfer data. That's about it. Where it is minimal from that approach. And business interruption, client base I mean, object base is a bit more touch points with the business, but from a client base, it's almost zero. We just take everything. And then the vague one is ongoing infrastructure costs. It's a bit lower because we are slicing your data on an object way, bringing in a bit smaller footprint, where your client base is just a bit higher because of you taking everything out of the system. Moving into the licensing model, which is important. Archive Central is a SaaS solution, so it is a subscription fee annually. Looking at here, you do a base system. How this works is if you've got one SAP system, you will pay for one system. If we're archiving two SAP systems, that could be an additional system. Part of the base subscription is a billion rows of data, twenty five users, and five hundred gigs of unstructured data. We do have add ons available, so additional systems, additional billion additional rows, additional users, as well as additional space for unstructured data. When I talk about unstructured data, that's your attachments, your payslips, tax documents, and so forth. From an implementation perspective, it is a one time implementation cost. It's for archive central deployment and the setup and cost and all that. It's for the professional services to do the extraction and build the screens. And then, of course, lease of the archive extractor. All of that is one time cost from that aspect. Going forward, the product is moving very quickly in the market. More and more needs are coming out for archive extractors, especially from a legacy perspective. What we are looking at in the near future is continuous archiving on Sfour HANA and ABAP, as well as expanding our best practices around Archive Central. More standard extractors for non ABAP that could be EPI-four, IFS, any systems we haven't done. And then continuous archiving for future versions is the continuous archiving growing more and more for other systems in that aspect as well. This roadmap is for just informational purposes. Just remember that, and it does change can change at any time. Maria? Yes. Thank you so much, Michael. Just so a few key takeaways before we close off today's webinar. We obviously have to declare define a clear strategy for your legacy data early. And the way that we can do this, we're happy to help you in this journey. You can request a free demo. We've put a few QR codes on the screen that you can scan with your phone, and they will take you to the right page to request the demo. But also, you can request a free legacy data assessment. This is a free assessment that we will run for you, and we will analyze the size system, the your, yeah, your system size, the footprint, which data types, etcetera. And you will see it through a very interactive dashboard on Client Central, and you will get one of our experts to work through it with you and hopefully, ideally, a plan together on how to go forward. And then last but not least, I would like to remind you, I don't know if you've received any communications yet from our side, but we are going to be in London and Manchester for Inspire UK on the nineteenth of October and twentieth of October. And in the Benelux, we're gonna be in Netherlands, in Utrecht on the fifth of November. So if you like this type of content, you would like to know more about the rest of our portfolio and all of our other solutions, these events are really good for it because all experts come together, our clients come together and it's really a very informative day. So without further ado, I think we are very much on the hour, on the half an hour. So I will say thank you to everyone that joined our webinar today. Thank you, Michael, presenting, and have a great rest of your day.