New recipe for historical data

The takeover of SABMiller's Central and Eastern European business by the Japanese Asahi Group made headlines in 2016. Less well known is the strategic SAP project for this business division: switching to a standardized SAP solution and decommissioning around 25 legacy ERP systems.

Mega mergers of the brewing groups

Concentration in the brewing industry is constantly increasing, so much so that the competition authorities have become involved in recent mega-takeovers.

The authorities insisted that Anheuser-Busch InBev sell its business in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Hungary and Romania as part of the takeover of SABMiller. As the undisputed number one in Europe, Anheuser-Busch's market position should not become even more dominant.

For Japan's number one in the brewing business, the Asahi Group, this was the perfect opportunity to establish a strong presence in Europe. Thanks to the takeover, Asahi Breweries Europe is now the number three in the European beer market and the owner of well-known traditional brands such as Pilsner Urquell and the London craft beer pioneer Meantime.

Takeovers and strong market concentration are often a sign of intensified competition with great pressure on margins. The beer market in Europe is hotly contested. As is the case with all large companies, the IT heart of a company beats in the ERP system.

SABMiller had over 25 such systems in use in Central and Eastern Europe, some of them from local providers. In order to achieve synergy effects and thus corresponding savings on licenses, data center infrastructure and maintenance, SABMiller had initiated a strategic SAP project: the consolidation of all ERP systems into a uniform SAP solution that was to be operated in a single, central data center.

Data archiving alone is not enough

Apart from the immense technical and personnel costs, the business and financial benefits of this project appear to be clear.

"However, the whole thing remains a 'milkmaid's calculation' as long as the costs for the availability of historical data are neglected. This is because ERP data from legacy systems, whether in finance or HR, is subject to different country-specific retention periods and must therefore be kept for different lengths of time"

emphasizes Maciej Malczynski, Head of Portfolio and Programs, IS Projects at Asahi Breweries Europe.

"Data archiving is not a sufficient solution here. After all, all relevant data records and documents must be stored in their original business context."

As a rule, this means that the original systems must continue to be operated for as long as the data must be retained for legal reasons. In the case of Asahi Breweries Europe, this would have meant that individual systems, especially in HR, would have had to continue to be operated for up to fifty years. In the long term, this would have negated the savings achieved by centralizing to a uniform SAP solution.

"When the decision for a standardized SAP template was made in 2015, it quickly became clear that we had to migrate the legacy data together with the business logic to a new, ideally also centralized platform in order to be able to access it independently of the original systems and still with full legal security"

emphasizes Maciej Malczynski.

However, the search for a tailor-made solution that also promised permanently low operating costs turned out to be more difficult than expected. This was because there were only a few solutions on the market that could even be considered for the problem. Maciej Malczynski explains:

"It was all the more pleasing that we came across the JiVS solution in the fall of 2015. Everything was just right: scope of functions, acquisition and operating costs, references and operating model."

Support from top management

The JiVS project lasted a total of 18 months and required a number of customer-specific developments to extract the data from the legacy systems, some of which were very specialized and no longer supported by their original manufacturers, and to migrate them to a technically newer format in a legally compliant manner, i.e. without changes or changeability.

This meant that around 25 legacy systems could be shut down. A total of 10 TB of data, which was all normalized to an SQL format, and 20 TB of documents were migrated to the JiVS platform and stored there.

Around 40 users from the finance and audit departments can thus access the historicized old data at any time, which is also all assigned an expiration date. When this date is reached, JiVS Retention Management automatically triggers the deletion process.

"The historicization and shutdown of the legacy systems had to run 'alongside', so to speak, as the switch to the central SAP solution took up the majority of our internal resources"

emphasizes Maciej Malczynski.

"We were therefore pleased that Data Migration also took over the operation of the solution for us. We use the platform as data and document access as a service. And everything has worked perfectly so far. None of our users have the right to change anything in the data records, and the information displayed is of course transmitted using strong encryption."

In April 2017, the last of the legacy systems was shut down and the historization of old data and documents was completed using JiVS. Even if the number of users of such a solution is naturally limited as it involves legacy data, it still requires the support of top management.

"It was easy to get, because the business advantage was obvious. In our case, the decommissioning saves us as much per year as the entire project cost. And the fees for Access as a Service are significantly lower than the previous costs for operating and maintaining the legacy systems that have now been decommissioned"

Maciej Malczynski calculates.

"But the resistance from the specialist departments was very strong, as always when it comes to financial data and legal requirements. You can't underestimate that. For this reason, support from the executive floor is crucial to the overall success of the project."

Asahi Breweries Europe is currently evaluating the impact of the new European General Data Protection Regulation (EU GDPR) on its own IT landscape. The transition period granted to companies, including immunity from prosecution, ends on May 25 of this year.

Platform for legacy data and documents

With the JiVS project, Asahi Breweries Europe is likely to have already taken an important step towards fulfilling the requirements of the regulation, at least as far as legacy data and documents are concerned. This is because JiVS enables the brewery to determine which personal data and information was stored and in what context at the level of individual data records and documents at the touch of a button.

Asahi Breweries Europe thus fulfills its duty to provide information both to supervisory authorities and to its customers. On the other hand, the company can carry out deletions at any time should the evaluation come to a corresponding conclusion.

"For both financial and legal reasons, the JiVS project is increasingly proving to be an investment in the future"

summarizes Maciej Malczynski.

"From what I hear from my colleagues in other companies, I think we are in a comfortable position as far as the EU GDPR is concerned."