A small manufacturing company made the strategic decision to start its SAP data archiving journey 15+ years ago, not as a reaction to a crisis, but as a proactive measure to safeguard system performance and ensure scalability.
Instead of waiting for a database to become an unmanageable burden, the company thought ahead, understanding that continuous, exponential data growth would inevitably lead to degraded performance and increased storage costs. Their core objective was simple: maintain only three years of essential, active transactional data online to guarantee rapid system speed for daily operations and instantaneous reporting.
This foresight established a strong foundation, leading to the sustained, positive outcomes detailed in the rest of the success story.
Seamless Access to Archived Data
The company’s commitment to continuous archiving was demonstrated by its ability to provide seamless access to archived data despite numerous core system changes. The initial archiving setup, implemented on SAP R/3 3.1H, remained intact through subsequent major upgrades and into SAP ERP ECC 6.
The archiving infrastructure evolved significantly throughout the company’s SAP landscape journey. Hardware progressed from a stand-alone archive server and physical jukebox to a fully virtual environment, with the archive server migrated to a virtual server and ISOs stored on the file system. This demonstrates a key principle: regardless of where you are in your landscape journey or what infrastructure changes you make, access to archived data is never lost.
Access to archived transactions also improved over time. In older SAP system versions, locating archived transactions was a slower, more cumbersome process. From SAP 4.6C onwards, this became far more transparent, with clearer visibility across the document flow and easy access to archived transactions through single-document access transactions.
SAP PrintList archiving provides an additional layer of historical record-keeping. It functions as a snapshot of report outputs at a specific point in time – such as month-end or year-end inventory reports – with the actual report output stored on the external archive server. The generation and storage of these PrintLists can be fully automated within SAP systems.
The consistent use of archive-enabled reports across all these versions ensured that business users could always access archived historical data transparently, regardless of the underlying SAP technical release.
Improved Business Performance
Since the initial implementation, the manufacturing company has successfully continued executing an annual archiving cycle, moving one complete fiscal year’s worth of business-complete transactional data (e.g., invoices, deliveries, sales orders, work orders, production orders, material movements) offline, where these ADK archive files are securely transferred and stored utilising an external Archive Link repository.
This consistent strategy has yielded substantial performance benefits across the entire SAP landscape:
- Settlement runs in Production Planning (PP) are significantly reduced following the completion of the annual archiving process each year, decreasing from approximately two hours to under ten minutes.
- Runtime of critical reports in Material Management and Plant Maintenance is also significantly reduced following the completion of the annual archiving process each year.
The Challenge of Master Data Archiving
While transactional data archiving proved relatively straightforward, the project team faced unexpected complexity with master data archiving, specifically with inactive materials. The initial assumption that simply flagging master data for deletion would suffice proved incorrect.
The biggest challenge was that the business had not been consistently closing completed records properly. This meant that purchase orders, production orders, and similar documents were being left open or incomplete rather than finalised.
For archiving to function effectively, the business needed to adopt a more disciplined approach – ensuring that all records are formally closed to a “business complete” status. This practice should be embedded as a standard step within monthly business processes.
The primary challenges included:
- Active Transaction Linkages: Many master data records flagged for “inactivity” (e.g., materials no longer purchased) still had open or incomplete transactional data linked to them (e.g., an unclosed purchase order, an open purchase requisition, or a production order stuck in ‘TECO’ status).
- Complex Dependency Chains: Master data cannot be archived until all dependent transactional records are closed, archived, or deleted. Identifying these deep-seated linkages and their exact status proved a monumental effort.
These were identified because of bad business practices.
The Outcome
They developed a comprehensive Data Archiving Strategy Document that proved essential to the project’s success. This document defines the necessary specific cleanup activities and correct business processes, detailing archiving prerequisites across all relevant application areas. This foundational work ensured that cleansing inactive transactional data became a continuous process, incorporating the necessary quality control checks to maximise the volume of historical data that could be successfully archived each cycle.
This systematic approach, driven by a clear strategy, ultimately allowed them to begin successfully archiving obsolete master data, further improving database efficiency and reducing data clutter.
Early Archiving Prevents Expensive Database Growth.
- Impact to date: ~600 GB freed from the SAP database
- Archive footprint: only ~25 GB (≈24× smaller)
- If they didn’t archive: the SAP DB would need +600 GB capacity planned and managed
- Why it matters: lower infra/TCO, faster backups/restores, smoother upgrades, and better performance
*Note: Based on historical results, actual reduction varies by data type and retention rules.
