For finance, procurement, or customer service representatives working for a world-class distributor that is accustomed to handling approximately 1,700 orders and 1,800 deliveries per business day, every second counts when creating or tracking sales or purchase orders (POs) for the company’s worldwide customers. Ensuring the continuation of reliable and timely global deliveries to over 25,000 customers was the basis for Nexeo Solutions, Inc.’s data management journey when the distribution company — which provides chemicals, plastics, and environmental services — became an independent company in April 2011, following a separation from its parent company. The goals of this data journey for Nexeo Solutions were two-fold: separate data from the parent company, and archive the data.

“We are a company fully committed to a culture of safety, sustainability, and compliance,” says Pat Jerding, Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Nexeo Solutions. “At the time of the separation, Nexeo Solutions became the only chemical distribution company on a global single instance of SAP ERP. Since our inception, we have been focused on continuous improvement that fosters efficiency, enables security, and leverages automation to deliver best-in-class service to our stakeholders.”

Prior to the divestiture, the distribution business had been running its core systems and processes on SAP software with an 8TB database infrastructure. As the divested business moved to become a standalone organization, it re-platformed its SAP database and implemented compression, reducing the database size to 2TB.

As the multi-phased data management journey commenced, the first step in separating Nexeo Solutions’ information from the legacy parent company was to “mask” or “scramble” data — a project the newly formed company and its partner Dolphin completed in parallel with a lift and shift of the parent’s SAP ERP system data at the close of the sale. Data masking or scrambling ensures that data is secured down to the lowest level in the database, which means that internal business users have access only to data to which they are legally entitled and data stays secure even if database tools are used to view and extract data. The volume of data that needed to be scrambled meant that time was of the essence to avoid business disruption.

Nexeo Solutions’ copy of the SAP system at the time of the lift and shift had nearly 140,000 vendors, more than 200,000 customers, and more than 300,000 material records. The company needed to sift through this to identify and scramble the non-Nexeo Solutions data before it could become fully independent. Because Nexeo Solutions’ data did not have a separate company code, the data could not be carved out separately. Rather, it had to scramble all company master data, including customer names, addresses, and payment information, replacing those line items with the word “masked.” So while the record still existed, the sensitive data was hidden.

Nexeo Solutions and Dolphin undertook this project with the knowledge that it was a short-term solution; the downside of data scrambling, especially with such large volumes of data, is that it creates a poor user experience for employees who must scroll through the scrambled data marked “masked” until they find what they need — an untenable position for a distributor.

Dave Falb, SAP Technology Manager for Nexeo Solutions, estimates that when the project was complete, between 50% and 75% of customer, vendor, and material data that appeared in a drop-down list was scrambled and rendered unusable. “Internal users saw a lot of scrambled data on the screen, and it slowed productivity,” says Falb. “There was sufficient end-user pain that drove the effort to clean up the SAP system and make the data proprietary to Nexeo Solutions.”

A Phased Approach

Because of the drastically compressed database and data masking solution, Nexeo Solutions could focus on key transformational projects before it tackled the data archiving piece, which was the second phase of its data management journey.

The dual purpose of data archiving was to carve out the non-Nexeo Solutions data — both business complete and not complete (uncleared) — and to archive historic Nexeo Solutions data. With an eye toward increased user efficiency and performance of key user transactions, the project would also reduce database size and establish a sustainable and secure archiving strategy that would accommodate future growth.

Since Dolphin was Nexeo Solutions’ partner for the successful project, the certified SAP solutions provider was the logical choice to lead the data archiving initiative as well, chosen from a short list of vendors that met the company’s comprehensive business requirements. In addition to possessing an in-depth knowledge of archiving according to SAP best practices, Dolphin specializes in the type of data carve-out project that Nexeo Solutions needed to perform. (For more details about Dolphin’s solutions and services, refer to the sidebar at the end of the article.)

Risk-Controlled Archiving

Dolphin honed this specialty in the interim between Nexeo Solutions’ data scrambling project and the archiving initiative, using some lessons learned from the first project to develop a solution that played a key role in the company’s eventual successful data migration project. During the first phase, manual processes were used to carve out the scrambled data so that Nexeo Solutions could become operational quickly; however, this labor-intensive strategy would not be acceptable to the company in the long term. With time constraints not being as much of a factor in the data archiving phase, Dolphin eyed a solution to automate many of the manual processes for a more effective, risk-free method of carving out functional data.

This led to the introduction of the Dolphin Accelerated Carve Out application, an SAP add-on software solution that enables organizations to carve out material, customer, and vendor master data from SAP systems while retaining the complex connections that exist between master data and transactional data. Dolphin developed the application specifically for projects like these that are necessitated by an acquisition or divestiture and involve both transactional and master data archiving.

In the case of the Nexeo Solutions project, the solution broke down the overall data archiving exercise into two distinct phases, the first of which was mass archiving of related transactional data that the solution selected according to conditions the company required. To facilitate the archival of master data that would come later, Nexeo Solutions — in consultation with Dolphin — identified 171 company codes, 147 sales organizations, one manufacturing plant, and nine purchasing organizations to be carved out of the system. The business also carved out non-Nexeo Solutions data it had received from its former parent company — comprising 40 million financial documents, more than two million sales orders and billing documents, roughly one million product costing runs, and around one million POs.

“It’s a method of targeting data that we no longer needed,” Falb says. “We built a criterion for specific sets of date ranges, organizational entities, customers, vendors, and materials.”

Building parameters is usually done in consultation with the business to identify the data that needs to be carved out. Business requirements are then mapped to data objects in the SAP system and variants are automatically generated to remove data from source systems. When the variants are run, the system is then tested and carve-out results are listed for easy review. By using the solution, a traditionally manually intensive project is shortened to just a few weeks depending on the complexity and amount of data to be carved out.

Tackling Master Data

The second phase — a master data carve-out — increased the project’s complexity for many reasons. Much of the complexity in this stage of the carve-out was due to Nexeo Solutions and the legacy parent having the same company code, meaning that prior to the separation they shared master data. For this reason, analyzing this data took more time than standard archiving; the project team had to constantly engage with functional users to investigate what was preventing a certain customer or organization from being archived.

“You never want to archive master data if anything related to the data, such as a material that’s part of a PO, wasn’t part of the original criteria. For example, if you archive material master data for which subordinate data (a PO) still exists, the PO may not display correctly,” Falb says. “It’s very customer specific and requires both a lot of technical experience and functional experience.”

This technical experience, says Falb, was one reason Nexeo Solutions chose Dolphin for the archiving project, an attribute that Dolphin cemented with the development of the Dolphin Accelerated Carve Out, which returned its greatest dividends during Nexeo Solutions’ master data archival.

The scope of work involved in the master data archival underscores Nexeo Solutions’ need for an automated solution. In the first several months of what turned out to be an 18-month project, the solution was used to run more than 10,000 archiving jobs before even getting to the master data. At the start of the master data phase of the project, those jobs must be run concurrently with master data jobs multiple times each month as records are being updated — a workload virtually impossible to handle using manual processes.

“The solution handles what a scheduler would normally do, but it also has built-in checks so we don’t inadvertently archive duplicate data, which is absolutely critical,” Falb says. “The accelerated carve-out tool provides auditable risk control and gave us confidence that we weren’t introducing risk into the archiving project.”

Some of the built-in checks and monitoring tools that Falb says proved helpful include an archiving throttling tool that allows a project owner to ramp up or down the number of processes that access the system according to a preset time or day. There is also an automated user sign-off tool to help isolate and detect an anomaly, such as if there was a posting to an archived company code or vendor. 

Primary Improvements

Nexeo Solutions completed its data archiving project in September 2017, successfully carving out 91% of targeted customers, 88% of targeted vendors, and 72% of targeted materials. The company also achieved a 500GB reduction in the size of its database. By being able to control the growth of its data volume over time, with ongoing archiving activities, Falb anticipates a demonstrable lower total cost of ownership of SAP systems. Other project benefits include an increase in productivity and a reduction in data volume, enabling faster transaction processing and simplified administration, which ultimately result in efficiencies in how the company delivers products and services to customers. “From the user’s perspective, the primary benefit is they no longer see scrambled data on the screen,” he says.  “And that has a direct impact on improved performance.”

With the database size now reduced, Nexeo Solutions expects to maintain a sustainable archiving strategy with minimal support needed. “We are now in a position for future growth, and we will continue to work with Dolphin on archiving moving forward,” says Jerding.