From an auditing perspective

The relief is understandable. It is an expression of the fact that audits of this kind involve more or less extra effort and also cause a certain amount of uncertainty among the people who have become the focus of the audit process.

However, when archived documents are included in the audit process in the course of business process audits or the analysis of payment measurement functions, the body language of KGS consultants does not express any uncertainty, but above all composure.

This reassuring attitude is based on the fact that the interaction of the proven SAP ArchiveLink interface with the migration tool KGS Migration4ArchiveLink is very reliable.

In the case of an archive migration performed via KGS Migration4ArchiveLink, a complete record of the migrated documents is also created. With the help of this proof, the correctness and completeness of the migrated document set can be documented.

The combination of source and target archive can be chosen arbitrarily in this procedure, as long as both archive systems support the ArchiveLink interface.

Auditors directly involved in reviewing migration results use statistical methods to determine samples of documents to be reviewed.

The documents in question are then accessed via search requests to the old archive system and the new archive system respectively. Satisfaction is established precisely when it can be determined with each of these accesses that the "subjects" are apparently and binarily identical.

The identity check of the sample documents is initially initiated by the auditor via a visual inspection. Documents placed next to each other on the screen with the window headings "old archive" and "new archive" quickly reveal whether the document contents are at least very similar.

If document migrations are carried out incorrectly, this is where the wheat is separated from the chaff. If the visual inspection is successful, the auditors then use a computer-aided image comparison process that searches bit by bit for differences in content.

If KGS Migration4ArchiveLink is used at this point, an interesting feature comes into play: the software already acts like an auditor during the migration. Not only does it ensure that each migration step is technically correct, but immediately after such a step has been performed, it also checks whether the document in question is now identically accessible in both the source archive and the target archive.

Unlike human inspectors, it does not perform a visual inspection, but it compares the document contents using electronic fingerprints taken from the documents before and after migration. The reliability of this process - as with human fingerprints - is very high.

The Migration4ArchiveLink customer reaps the fruits of the early bird check, because it becomes clear already during the document migration that all successfully migrated documents are identical.

The consequences are serenity among the "business process owners" and key users as well as less tension during the presentation of the audit results.