Why Archive Now?

Many large organizations using SAP systems have been accumulating large volumes of transactions from sales orders, purchase orders, production orders and all the financial documents associated with each. This has led to large database build up sometimes amounting to over a terabyte of data. The impact of this large volume is deterioration of system response, longer search and reporting and back up times and added costs of maintaining hardware for disk and storage devices.

Although the process of archiving execution is well structured through SAP-delivered tools and functions, ArchivePac helps provide a roadmap to deploy these tools. ArchivePac delivers an overarching archiving strategy easily managed from a central point of visibility to all archiving information. Archiving in an SAP environment can be seen as having two aspects--

The first aspect addresses a best practices approach for a 'clean' system by answering questions like:

The second aspect is one of compliance with the statutory and regulatory guidelines from federal, state and local bodies and enforcing agencies like FDA, EPA and OSHA. This requires answers to questions like:

Since every environment is unique based on the industry, business volume and amount of customization in the SAP system, there is no single process that can be replicated. To help companies address all of the above questions, Intelligroup offers ArchivePac to guide clients through a central strategy, methodology and deployment approach to data archiving.
 

ArchivePac Methodology

The ArchivePac Total Archiving Strategy encompasses 4 phases - assessment, awareness, archive execution and advice. ArchivePac is the guiding tool in all phases through its central Cockpit for analysis and monitoring.

The Assessment Phase

The discovery and analysis phase is the first step to launching an overall corporate archiving strategy. The main objectives of this phase are to understand the system landscape, provide visibility to identify objects /tables /data that need to be archived, and analyze the storage space and technical requirements. A high-level project plan is prepared with estimated resources, timelines and costs.

The Awareness Phase

Here we use best practices for data governance to analyze the findings and help strategize the next steps to formulating a archiving strategy. Considerations include technology, business needs, and statutory demands.

The Archive Execution Phase

The analysis and strategy evolved from the previous phases will be deployed to drive the execution phase. This is where the actual data movement, deletion, archival and reload takes place. The length of this phase varies widely based on the volume of data and steps required.

The Advice Phase

This phase captures the lessons learned, institutionalizing the process for periodic archiving, delivering guidance to the business/legal constituents and providing final documentation.