Chemical solutions company Kemira on its journey to robust data archiving

⇨ Kemira, a Finnish sustainable chemical solutions company, transitioned from its long-standing archiving solution to a new system due to the need for expansion.

⇨ The new archiving system, tia from KGS Software GmbH, was selected for its ability to handle a significant data migration of about 10 million documents, with a focus on business continuity and fast data access during the transition.

⇨ The successful implementation of the new archiving solution has simplified operations for Kemira employees, who now archive documents without impacting their daily work, while meeting legal obligations.

As businesses aim to boost their adaptability to improve chances of success in the competitive environment, many realize they need to realign their processes and structures when existing systems and workflows reach their limits.

In one such case, Kemira, a Finnish sustainable chemical solutions company for water-intensive industries, decided to part with its long-standing archiving solution as the organization was faced with the task of expanding its existing on-premise archiving solution.

When making its choice, the company’s upcoming transformation to SAP S/4HANA played a key role. This meant that the new archiving specialist had to have experience with hyperscalers and Azure. The requirements for the new archiving project were clear from the outset – about 10 million documents had to be migrated, with the 3 TB of data archived with invoices and logistics documents having the biggest priority. 

“We also needed to ensure that all running systems would not be affected by data migration, that the availability of business-critical data was guaranteed at all times and that opening documents from the new archive would not take too long,” said Johanna Pakkanen, senior IT manager at Kemira.

Scanning the market for suitable opportunities, Kemira came across tia, the intelligent archiving system from KGS Software GmbH (kgs), and decided to use this solution as its new archiving option. 

From a proof of concept (PoC) carried out in January 2023 to a kick-off project in March, the migration to the new system was completed in May. The project wrapped up in September of the same year.

Preserving what matters with SAP data archiving 

As a result, all departments of Kemira currently archive their documents on the kgs archiving platform. Very few of them know which system they use to archive their data because the simplicity of doing it doesn’t impede their day-to-day work. Behind the scenes, Kemira employees still process their documents in SAP and are hardly aware of how they are archived in the background in an audit-proof way.

As archiving is not a nice-to-have service, but a legally binding obligation, the company is reaping the benefits of everything running smoothly. “While the response times and stability of the solution with the previous provider were not optimal, with kgs, we are very satisfied with the cooperation, the contract terms and the individual support,” Pakkanen says.

This case demonstrates how prioritizing its evolving archiving needs allowed the company to strengthen its work and freed employees from the burden of performing entangled archiving.