Case Study: Keeping Legacy Data Safe (REWE Group, an Internationally Active Trading Group)

REWE Group is an internationally active trading group headquartered in Cologne. Its history goes back to the year 1927. After the Second World War, the cooperative purchasing association developed into one of the largest trading groups in Germany. In the 2000s, tourism developed into a second mainstay.

The Group is organized on a cooperative basis; REWE-Zentralfinanz eG forms the Group parent company; the supermarket business in Germany is managed by the Group company REWE Markt GmbH. In 2019, REWE Markt GmbH took over Supermarkets North with approximately 9,000 employees and around 150 stores.

In order to avoid duplicate structures and reduce costs, the SAP system of Supermarkets North, which was taken over into the Group, was no longer to be operated productively. In contrast to the current, operational data, the legacy data was not to be transferred to the REWE SAP system. REWE was nevertheless faced with the challenge of retaining this data as cost-effectively as possible for tax-relevant audits. Since the commercial relationships were also to be retained, the choice for decommissioning the SAP system of Supermarkets North fell on the PBS solution Enterprise Content Store. The PBS ECS is a PC-based solution into which data (e.g. for tax audit purposes) can be easily extracted from the SAP system environment and handed over to the auditing instances for SAP-independent processing.

SAP-independent data access

Within the scope of the project, the focus was on the complete transfer of the legacy data including the attached documents from the areas of financial accounting, cost accounting and human resources.
In total, 7 company codes had to be transferred to PBS ECS. These were the three company codes Sales, Logistics and Administration from the ERP system and four additional company codes from the HR system. This resulted in a total data volume of 740 GB. This volume is made up of 4.5 million CO documents and 35 million FI documents. In the HR area, this included all HR master data and payroll, working time evaluations and travel data for 86,000 personnel numbers. The extraction of this data was carried out by PBS using the extraction tool CONEX. In addition to the structured data from the SAP database, the corresponding documents and print lists had to be saved. Here, PBS was able to provide optimal support with the help of the Content Reader and the Extract Cockpit REWE. These tools were used to create the links to the unstructured data in the previous storage systems. Subsequently, the 470,000 documents (FI invoice documents in PDF format, for example) and 800 SAP print lists could be downloaded and securely stored in the file system of the PC-based ECS. The operation of the former content management system could thus also be discontinued.

Simple further processing

All legacy data of the affected 7 company codes including the HR data was successfully extracted from the SAP system using the PBS means and imported into the PBS ECS. There they are available for evaluation with predefined views. In addition, the data can be exported in SAP AIS format, for example for audits by the tax authorities or social insurance, as well as passed on to MS Excel for further processing.

Summary