Once you have done SAP archiving… What if we face a business reason to reverse?

In an ideal world we have all been effectively using SAP archiving. But what if you are faced with the need to do the reverse?

With that, we mean to get data out of the archive, and back into SAP or elsewhere. A plausible business reason could be a divestment, i.e. selling of a division or part of the business. Or it could be an acquisition, i.e. a part of the company sold to another company, and all relevant data needs to be carved out. In recent years, we saw a darker reason, in context of EU sanctions towards Russia, forcing organizations to divest or take out Russian related business data and documents from their systems.

Should you be worried?? Not really, as we have seen even complex scenarios possible to handle from within SAP in a matter of only weeks.? Below is an insight on possible approach, for a case where a business area (let's call it Functional area) was sold to a “New Owner”. Note: for New Owner, a new SAP system on virtual machines was prepared already for non-archived data.? Our scope was to secure archived data and ensure documents were properly extracted from the archive and inserted to that new New Owner SAP system.

The Process

1)??? Identify the amount and create an inventory of Documents that are currently stored in the Archive relative to the Functional area and new Owner.?

2)??? Analyze existing documents filenames for any special characters used in filenames.?

3)??? Implement a base migration program and if necessary, adjust to handle additional selection criteria in support of any requirements for a phase selected approach of migration.?

4)??? Extract documents from the archive and store in SAP DB linking them back to the correct business transactions/data.?

5)??? Validate if the documents can be retrieved and viewed from within the related business transactions in SAP and remediate defects.?

6)??? Delete the documents in the Archive after the migration and successful verification.?

Additional info

-????? Count of relevant objects/documents in linking tables was about 1.2 million?

-????? Documents were in two logical archives – one is data form a single functional area, the second was mixed with other functional areas?

-????? New Owner users often added documents manually in SAP. There is a probability that they could have chosen a different content repository than expected, by error. There was a need to handle that.?

-????? Standard data archiving was done using SARA. The Client had already restored the archived data back onto SAP file system. However, we must take this into account to avoid possible impact during our re-linking of archived attachments/documents.

Considerations

Due to extreme tight deadlines, we had to consider possible parallel data migration runs of the more simple migration job with the preparation of the more complex data selection job of the mixed content repository (i.e. prepare and start the more simple part that can be fully migrated and re-linked without specific selection criteria and in parallel work on the separation/selection job of the data in the mixed content repository).