Advising Wisely Thanks to Hybrid Archiving

The project was preceded by traditional archiving of sales-related SAP data via ArchiveLink - a technology that the new sales system did not support. As the decision had been made not to migrate the existing documents, the key question was: what options were available and what interface could be used to integrate the new system into the existing archiving concept?

Archiving with CMIS

In its search for a solution, MVG turned to the archiving specialists at KGS, who had already designed and implemented the existing archive. They worked closely together to develop a concept based on the existing archiving platform, which not only supports the established ArchiveLink technology, but also the open CMIS standard. The idea behind this was to use CMIS to store the new non-SAP-based sales documents in an audit-proof manner on the central KGS platform.

From the outset, the declared aim of the project was to minimize access times to documents for customer advisors. Service quality should not suffer under any circumstances - on the contrary. For this reason, the archived documents were additionally enriched with metadata, such as customer or contract numbers, and stored via CMIS. The archived data was then accessed independently of the original system via a "single point of truth", the KGS archive, which the municipal utilities had already been working with previously.

Archiving bridge builder

The entire project was implemented within a year with a small team of archiving specialists from KGS and IT specialists from the transport company. Today, only two IT specialists from Stadtwerke are responsible for ongoing operations. Those responsible at Stadtwerke see the low personnel costs for operating the system and the fact that no migration of the five million or so archive data was necessary as a major advantage - both from a time and a financial perspective. Stadtwerke also no longer has to worry about meeting regulatory requirements, such as retention periods or data protection requirements. The reason: the KGS archiving platform automatically ensures compliance.

Enabler for digital projects

The hybrid archiving project is having a signal effect. In the meantime, other departments of the municipal utilities are examining the extent to which the use of the KGS archiving platform, including CMIS and ArchiveLink technology, would be worthwhile for them too. Project manager Sebastian Dumdei sees the course set for the future: "The technology can serve as an enabler for standardized processes and support future digital projects."

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