Ditching that historic data is the key to refreshing SAP systems

⇨ PG Group faced challenges with increased SAP database size, leading to higher costs, slower transactions, and prolonged report runtimes.

⇨ The implementation of OpenText Data Archiving for SAP Solutions enabled PG Group to archive historical data, significantly improving system performance and reducing storage costs.

⇨ The project resulted in the removal of approximately 1TB of data from the SAP database, which not only enhanced overall efficiency but also ensured that all archived data remained accessible via the SAP user interface.

Organizations across the globe leverage SAP solutions to streamline business processes, boost productivity and enhance customer experience. As new data is generated with each new business transaction, SAP database volumes continue to increase.

This growth in data can impact system performance, prolong backup and restore times, and increase the costs of system administration and storage. Thus, a reduction in system performance can influence an organization’s SAP system health, data compliance, user acceptance and resource consumption.

PG Group, an automotive and building glass manufacturer and distributor, found themselves needing this type of a system refresh when faced with substantial growth of their SAP database that impacted overall system performance.

The company chose OpenText, a provider of information management solutions, to help it organize, integrate and protect data and content flowing through its SAP database.

The challenge

PG Group’s costs increased as they required additional storage space for their data. The lack of space also meant that daily reports would often take more than a day to run, thus impacting productivity and efficiency.

Magda Allan, SAP Business Solutions manager at PG Group, said: “As we were using so much space, a lot of transactions were running increasingly slower. Every time we added a new project to SAP, we had to purchase additional expensive storage capacity.”

The solution

The company then decided to implement OpenText Data Archiving for SAP Solutions. According to Allan, the solution would “enable us to archive historical data, reduce the size of the SAP database and improve performance.”

Working with EOH, an OpenText partner, to implement OpenText Data Archiving for SAP solutions, PG Group saw an improvement in its SAP database performance after archiving many years of data to the OpenText solution.

The project not only removed around 1TB of data from the SAP database for improved overall performance, but also reduced report runtimes to hours. The costs of buying additional space were also lowered significantly.

Additionally, as part of the implementation, EOH identified opportunities to further enhance the performance of SAP including configuration changes which would see updates to the production process.

“By removing historic, infrequently used data from SAP to more cost-effective storage, we’ve been able to provide the business with a responsive and efficient system. No data has been sacrificed, though it is all still available to us from within the SAP user interface,” Allan concluded.