Decommissioning of SAP applications

Companies have always been interested in decommissioning SAP systems as soon as they no longer need to be permanently available for business processes. Decommissioning is always accompanied by the expectation of a reduction in costs: operating and licensing costs can be saved.

For example, when companies and parts of companies are sold or when companies are restructured. But also when switching from R/2 to R/3 or ERP ECC - or now increasingly when switching to the Hana-based S/4.

When a legacy system is replaced by a new system environment based on a greenfield approach, there is virtually always a need to continue to retain certain data after system decommissioning and make it available for various analysis purposes.

For reasons of a tax audit, social security audits, internal audits as well as data analysis, product liability and more.

Determining in detail which data from a database and/or an archiving system must continue to be available after an SAP system shutdown is a thoroughly demanding task.

As a rule, a team from different departments is responsible for such a project in a company, possibly also with the involvement of an external consulting company that provides extensive knowledge or experience know-how in SAP system decommissioning/fixing.

Extracting all data from an SAP system that is to be decommissioned in order to be able to use it at a later date or to continue to use it is not very expedient for reasons of cost and effort.

The effort or duration of such an SAP system decommissioning can vary greatly. There are projects that are completed in perhaps ten days, but they can also take 100 man-days or more, depending, for example, on the number of company codes envisaged or the diversity of the SAP data to be extracted.

In any case, this should be addressed at an early stage, preferably when deciding to decommission SAP applications or before the actual plan to switch to S/4 Hana, for example.

Tailored to SAP

As probably the only SAP partner worldwide, PBS Software has been providing a supplementary solution specifically for the topic of SAP system decommissioning for years as part of its product portfolio for Information Lifecycle Management.

Like all SAP add-on solutions, it is distributed by PBS and its partners or used by partner companies or consulting firms in decommissioning projects in the SAP environment.

This is a lean and economical standard solution. It represents an alternative to the SAP ILM solution with which SAP covers the topic of SAP shutdowns.

With the SAP solution, even the largest decommissioning requirements can be implemented, but it still requires functioning SAP applications such as ERP and BW during such a decommissioning. In contrast, the PBS solution no longer requires a running SAP system after decommissioning.

The solution from PBS essentially consists of two components: On the one hand, the so-called PBS Content Extractor (CONEX) ensures that data can be extracted/extracted from SAP systems in a transparent format; on the other hand, the second component, the PC-based/Windows-based PBS Enterprise Content Store, ensures that the extracted data can be managed, protected, filtered, displayed or used for analysis purposes also through specially prepared views as required.

A key benefit of the solution: the provision of easy-to-use functions for handling or evaluating SAP data, thereby enabling non-SAP users to perform data research in a simple manner.

Transparency writ large

What does standard software mean in this context? What is special about the PBS solution for SAP system shutdowns? On the one hand, a standardized, tried and tested procedure that can be traced at any time is used to extract the data.

Here, extraction objects are created and used, matching the respective application data in the SAP environment. Specifically, specially usable objects are generated or created, for example an FI document, an SD document or dedicated objects for production data.

Custom objects - Z tables

In addition, custom objects can be created. This means that further tables, especially customer-specific ones - so-called "Z-tables" - can be included in the extraction. It is also possible to integrate SAP archive files (ADK) into the extraction.

In addition, companies have the option of including or transferring non-structured information such as documents and print lists from an existing DMS system by reference in addition to the table data. These are then also available in the PBS Enterprise Content Store for use after an SAP system shutdown for evaluations.

SAP DART files for company audits

With ECS, SAP DART files can also be imported and further processed. Many customers use DART to generate data extracts for a data carrier transfer of tax-relevant data in the environment of tax audits.

The PBS Enterprise Content Store provides considerably more functionalities than a usual storage system. With this PBS solution, not only can SAP tables or SAP data be displayed and navigated in, but they can also be processed further or used for the most diverse purposes.

For example, for printing, for creating Excel files, for transaction-like SAP document display based on SAP transactions or for analytics purposes (also with predefined views for SAP data evaluation or in connection with analysis tools such as SAP Crystal Reports or SQL Server Business Intelligence).

Of course, there are also checking or testing functions to ensure that data extractions performed are exactly those agreed upon - in addition to very advanced user management and access control (to SAP documents, print lists and extracts).

According to requirements

It is in the nature of the SAP system decommissioning thing: After a completed data extraction/data extraction from a legacy SAP system with de facto one-time use over a certain period of time, the data extraction component (Content Extractor) is not needed permanently. This is exactly why it is also offered as rental software.

The situation is different for the other component, the PC-based enterprise content store system including SQL database into which the SAP data has been imported. It is used or operated as long as the respective data has to be kept available.

If some of the data is actually no longer needed, it can simply be deleted from the database. The rule of thumb is: the longer data is kept, the better. After all, you never really know how long you will need certain data. Incidentally, PBS is currently evaluating the possibility of making this component available as a cloud solution in the future.

In principle, the standard solution for SAP system decommissioning presented is suitable for use in all SAP application systems or modules (including industry solutions) and has already proven itself in numerous national and international projects.

SAP shutdown concrete:

Sale of a business unit

Practically with the decision of a medium-sized company (around 200 employees, approximately 50 million euros in sales) to sell a business unit, the issue was to decommission an SAP ECC system. At the same time, the manufacturing company, which does not wish to be named, had a requirement to remove relevant SAP data from the system. These were to continue to be available for a certain period of time after the decommissioning. Primarily for retention reasons. Everything went as planned. Approximately 40,000 invoice documents from a DMS, around 700 HR master records and several thousand travel receipts (HR data) were extracted or transferred to the PBS Enterprise Content Store using the PBS solution CONEX. The project only took ten man-days, which meant that the implementation costs could easily be kept within the given budget limits.