SAP and Non-SAP Legacy System Decommissioning

Most businesses acquire a high number of legacy systems over a period of time, these systems are expensive to run with inefficient hardware and high licencing costs, whilst complicating the IT infrastructure.

Organisations need to reduce overall costs of their IT Infrastructure, be it to fund new innovative technologies or simply to reduce TCO, with Proceeds Decommissioning for SAP and Non-SAP legacy systems, we simplify the processes, store the data securely and safely should it be required for reporting or auditing purposes be that on-premise or in the Cloud, eliminating associated costs of keeping the these rarely accessed system online, we even take away the pain of managing this data.

Proceed provide the following services to ensure a smooth delivery of both solution, reporting and data transfer;

Analysis & Blueprinting

At the core of any successful decommissioning project lies the analysis & blueprinting phase. During this phase the ERP system to be decommissioned is analysed in detail. This provides an understanding of what volume of data needs to be extracted and moved to the decommissioning solution. The blueprint also considers what reports the users use and how these are to be created in the new solution.

Data Extraction

Extraction of the data needs to be carefully planned and orchestrated to ensure that all the data is brought across to the new solution. As the Legacy ERP solution will be switched off after the data has been extracted it has to be right first time.

Report Generation

Access to the legacy data is still required for audit, compliance and to ensure that the business can report on data for operational reasons. Design and delivery of the reports required are an important part of our service delivery.

To enable Proceed to analyse data residing within the ERP landscape, access is required to the production systems for our consultants to investigate what data must be decommissioned. The purpose of the blueprint document is to provide a full in-depth analysis of the data residing within the legacy ERP systems and an indication of the type and frequency of reports run on a regular basis. The blueprint also discusses what unstructured data (documents) are stored and associated with each of the ERP systems. The anticipated blueprint audience includes, senior management, key users and functional consultants. The blueprint sets out how long each type of data needs to be retained once decommissioned before being deleted or moved to further “very-long term storage”.

The strategy differs for various data within the same business and could differ for the same data between different operating companies within a potential group. The final version of the blueprint is signed off by the representatives from the business,and used as a reference check during the realisation phase of the project, to ensure that solutions being developed & implemented meet the agreed requirements.

SAP Information Lifecycle Management (ILM)

Decommissioning Process

Data is extracted from the legacy system using SAP Landscape Transformation Technology (SLT). Once extracted it is subsequently archived using enhanced archiving objects into the ILM.

Reporting

Reports that are required need to be created either using ABAP report writer tools or by creating BW queries. When a report is called the data must first be extracted from the SAP ILM Retention Warehouse.

Solution Architecture

ILM Retention Warehouse runs on a dedicated NetWeaver technology stack and requires an associated relational database. If SAP BW is being used for reporting then a BW landscape is required.

Next Generation Reporting on Legacy Data

One of the biggest challenges and costs associated with decommissioning an ERP solution is the creation of reports. Creating reports using ILM technologies or SAP BW can take time and incur development costs.  Proceed, has Accelerate a solution which delivers reports covering most areas of an ERP solution which can be deployed either locally or in the cloud.

Accelerate for SAP provides SAP centric reports many of which can be used out of the box without any development work.  Accelerate also works for all other legacy ERP solutions. Enabling reports to be created for solutions such as Oracle Financials, JD Edwards, BaaN etc.