When Amcor Rigid Plastics set out on its SAP data archiving journey in 2007, it had one big business driver in mind: Improving its SAP system performance. With one SAP instance for the entire division—that includes 11 countries, 69 plants and 550 concurrent users (2,000 named ones)—there was simply a lot of data to read. And that necessitated a lot of processing time to get users their reports.

This was especially the case at each month’s end: Users would log so much activity on the system that it would almost grind to a halt, says Robert V. Bobba, senior SAP business analyst at the global packaging company.

Amcor Rigid Plastics is typical of many SAP shops. It went live with SAP R/3 in 2001 and now runs ECC 6, BI 7.0, SCM 5.0, SRM 7.0 and Solution Manager 7.1, as well as Portal, MDM and CRM. When SAP implementations were rolled out en mass in the early 2000s, the level of data managed by those systems was much smaller than what the reality is today, says Dr. Werner Hopf, President of Dolphin, a vendor that specializes in information lifecycle management and BPM software and services that worked on Amcor’s project.

Combine that with the improvements in archiving technology—not simply storing it in the proverbial basement and making it difficult to find and access when it’s needed again, Hopf says—and you have a boom in data archiving projects by companies looking to get better SAP application performance and lower TCO.

By archiving 4 Terabytes of data, Amcor was able to decrease the size of the database to just 1 Terabyte while improving SAP performance by 50 percent, Bobba says.

Bobba shared some of his recommendations for successful SAP data archiving projects:

Take a phased approach and pick the low-hanging fruit first. The functional heads at Amcor Rigid Plastics were apprehensive to take up a project requiring a ton of time from their people, Bobba says. In fact, he struggled for a year to get those heads to commit their resources for just a few hours a week, both because of the apprehension in being able to access archived data and because there were a lot of other projects going on at the same time.

But Bobba started proving the value of data archiving by first using SAP tools and archiving data that wouldn’t need to be accessed by the business. Those areas included iDocs and related tables, as well as warehouse transfer orders. The shelf life of some of this data was short—certainly not beyond six months, he says. For this portion, Bobba’s team archived the data to the file system, and, if it got too big, then to tape.

“We knew we had to hit these areas right away because the jobs weren’t completing,” he says. For instance, the warehouse activity monitor report was overlapping by a day.

Walk before running. This project worked so well and transactions improved so dramatically that Amcor Rigid Plastics knew it needed to do more archiving, Bobba says. It set out collecting requirements for what was needed in terms of access back to the data.

But still, before starting major archiving projects in Phase 2, Bobba’s team completed a few mini projects, to prototype certain solutions. For instance, Bobba’s team wanted to prototype the fact that it could store the archived data in a different data center from where its SAP system is hosted, and retrieve the data back into the system as needed.

Upgrade to ECC 6.0. Phase 2 also involved upgrading to ECC 6.0, which enabled more archiving projects and more features in the archiving toolkit. Bobba recommends upgrading to ECC 6.0 as a best practice in SAP archiving projects.

Amcor Rigid Plastics also needed to purchase software that would allow for easy data retrieval. There were plenty of alternatives, Bobba says, but Amcor ended up going with Dolphin because its software offered the most capabilities, as well as an “ease of use” factor. Amcor didn’t need to train users on ways of getting to the data.

“That to me was invaluable,” he says. “For our company, it was a no brainer.”

The key to overcoming that initial fear of data archiving is to make the archived world as transparently accessible to users as possible, Hopf says.

“Everybody’s afraid of losing information and the business units own their data—they need to buy into an archiving project driven from the SAP Basis or infrastructure side,” he says. “Having a good answer for ‘How the heck do I get back to my information?’ is key to being successful and generating savings.”

Look beyond ROI of disk savings. It’s not just the disk savings that are returns to the company, Bobba explains. “It is the performance improvements that are going to give your users a better usage experience. They can run their reports faster and will be less frustrated doing day to day activities.”

Engage consultants, but be careful to know your data first. Every company should try and identify low-hanging fruit in SAP ECC and BW systems for archiving, Bobba says. Consultants can help a great deal—Amcor used SAP and two different consultancies in the various phases of its project—but companies need to be wise about it in order to get the biggest bang for the buck.

“You have to be very knowledgeable as a customer; you have to know your data inside and out,” Bobba says. Having cross-functional knowledge of the modules certainly helps. All of the people responsible for those modules need to come together and understand their data completely before engaging a consultant.

Remember: Archiving is a continuous process, not a project. Bobba’s team members have ensured that the archiving process is less intensive in the number of things they need to do by automating certain areas of the archiving jobs using the archiving session cockpit. Data comes up for archiving based on data residence policies. “[Data archiving] is a permanent IT process when you have an SAP system,” Bobba says.

Member Alert:

Check out Amcor Rigid Plastics’ Data Archiving Webcast

Check out the many resources from the ASUG Archiving and Information Lifecycle Management Special Interest Group

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