Maintaining an efficient SAP system requires effectively managing large volumes of business data, and successful data archiving is vital to this process. However, a common and essential question is determining which data is eligible for archiving or considered ‘business-complete’ before starting the archival process.
While business-complete data may no longer be required for active operations, it is often required to be retained for legal, historical or compliance reasons. By understanding the criteria for determining when data is no longer needed for active business processes, your organisation can streamline archiving projects, optimise SAP system performance, and reduce storage costs.
Why Identifying Business Complete Data Matters
Accurately archiving eligible data reduces clutter, helping keep your SAP system responsive and focused on active, vital data. It ensures you’re not storing unnecessary information, and that only essential records are maintained and easily accessible. Below, we’ve outlined 5 key steps to get you started in identifying business complete data in SAP.
Step 1: Define your Archiving Criteria
Let’s start by setting clear criteria for what qualifies as business complete data. This will help streamline the process and ensure your data meets all necessary requirements.
- Age of Data: Decide on a data archiving cut-off date. We recommend a period of five years or more. For example, any purchasing or sales data older than five years may be a good candidate for archiving, depending on business needs and regulatory requirements.
- Last View Date: Consider data that has not been accessed in the determined time period as it may be suitable for data archiving.
- Business Relevance: Data related to obsolete products or services, such as historical transactions for discontinued products, can generally be archived with little to no impact. Archived data can still be accessed if needed for audits, historical analysis, or customer inquiries. However, it is always important to verify the business context and any relevant retention policies before proceeding.
Once these filters are applied, you can clearly see which historical records are no longer required for business processes. If the data complies with retention policies, archiving is appropriate.
Step 2: Business Value and Regulatory Requirements Assessment
Since different industries assess data differently, ensure you consider the value of your organisation’s data before archiving, as historical data may still hold value or be required for compliance, trend analysis, or long-term decision-making. Here are a few examples:
- Manufacturing: Certain historical production data can play a key role in continuous improvement initiatives and operational optimisation efforts.
- Retail: While not essential for daily operations, many retailers may keep sales data to examine seasonal trends or customer preferences, to support their strategic planning.
- Financial Institutions: Financial institutions and banks are often required to retain data beyond five years to comply with regulatory audits and ensure they can produce records when required or requested.
By understanding your organisation’s industry-specific requirements, you can safeguard your company from potential operational and compliance risks. Ensuring that data meets both business and regulatory needs is fundamental.
Step 3: Confirm Data Completeness
To qualify for archiving, each business object in SAP must meet specific criteria. Here are a few examples of what this looks like across different types of data records:
- Sales Orders: Requires all invoices to be processed, all payments completed and no pending disputes. This ensures the sales data is closed and no further changes are expected.
- Purchase Orders: For archiving, receipts and invoices for all goods must be verified, fully delivered and posted, and there should be no outstanding issues or adjustments.
- Financial Documents: Financial records, like invoices and journal entries should be fully reconciled with all necessary reports generated. As a prerequisite for archiving, historical financial accounting line items in SAP should be posted and/or cleared as appropriate.
- Material Master Data: Materials marked as obsolete, with no active stock, open orders or incomplete sales data, for instance, can be archived. Ensure that other related data (like bills of materials, routings, dependent batch records) are also closed or flagged for deletion to avoid any complications.
Completing these steps ensures that each item has completed its lifecycle, preparing the data for archiving.
Step 4: Review Data Access Frequency and Modification History
Frequent access to certain data, may indicate that it is still in use and perhaps not yet ready for archiving. We recommend the following to evaluate access:
- Access Frequency: Review all system logs to determine how regularly these records are accessed, and if rarely or never accessed, they can be safely archived.
- Modification History: If records haven’t been updated for five years or longer, this data is ready for archiving as it no longer requires modifications.
These recommendations will help you identify historical data that can be archived without affecting an active business.
Step 5: Conduct an Audit and Stakeholder Review
The final step is to validate potential business-complete data through a structured review process:
- Audit: Conduct a final review of all identified data to confirm its completeness and compliance. This is a vital step to ensure a smooth archiving process.
- Stakeholder Approval: Present your audit findings to all relevant department heads and data owners. Once signed off is received, you will have confirmation that the data is complete and ready for archiving.
Key Takeaways
By following GlueData’s proven approach to identifying and archiving business complete data, your organisation can unlock significant benefits, including improved system performance, reduced storage costs, and support for regulatory compliance. Effective SAP data archiving is key to smooth operations – by setting clear criteria, balancing business and regulatory needs, and conducting a final audit, you can ensure your SAP system operates at its best.
Reach out to us to learn more about identifying business-complete data in your SAP system and empower your organisation to drive growth while cutting through the clutter of unnecessary data.
