SAP Archiving Software in Use – Stable Performance and Reduced Costs
Customer & Initial Situation
The customer is a multinational electronics corporation with more than 100 subsidiaries in around 30 countries. In a complex SAP environment, the company uses the SAP archiving solution by inPuncto to centrally archive outgoing and incoming business documents in a secure, audit-compliant, and scalable manner. inPuncto GmbH is a software provider and has been an SAP partner for over 25 years.
Archived documents include order confirmations and invoices, including EDI messages. The solution is complemented by convenient features such as mass reprinting of archived documents directly from SAP using multiple selections. It is designed for high data volumes and long-term scalability. As early as the initial implementation, around 11 million legacy documents were migrated and indexed. Today, several hundred SAP users work with the solution, which can be operated both on-premises and in the cloud and can be flexibly expanded to include additional document types or a global rollout.
Challenge: High Peak Loads in Operational Processing
In large enterprise environments with time-critical, SAP-based business processes, short-term peak loads occur regularly – particularly during parallel batch processing. At defined times during daily operations, a large number of almost simultaneous write accesses occurred. These load peaks occasionally led to increased response times for database queries. However, the analysis clearly showed that the database itself was not the bottleneck. Instead, the control and coordination of parallel access offered optimization potential.
Solution: Quickly and Sustainably Stabilizing Performance
Thanks to the modular architecture of the SAP-certified archiving software from inPuncto, targeted optimizations could be implemented quickly. The goal was to further develop the archiving processes so that they would remain stable, high-performing, and scalable even under very high short-term loads.
Transparency of System Utilization
Enhanced monitoring now provides transparency regarding the current utilization of database connections. This foundation enabled a well-informed assessment of the load situation and resource-efficient fine-tuning of system parameters.
Scalable Control of Parallel Access
Based on the insights gained, the available connection capacities were selectively expanded. This ensures that even short-term load peaks during batch operations can be reliably absorbed. In practice, operations remain stable even with high parallelism – the scaling mechanism takes effect precisely when it is needed.
Technological Foundation: SAP-Certified biz²ArchiveServer from inPuncto
The biz²ArchiveServer is used – a SAP-certified archiving solution that integrates seamlessly into existing SAP system landscapes. The solution supports SAP ArchiveLink and SAP ILM, among others, and enables audit-compliant, legally compliant archiving of documents and data. The archive sustainably relieves SAP systems, efficiently manages large volumes of data, and, thanks to its modular architecture, offers a high degree of flexibility for different performance and scalability requirements.
SAP ILM: The Next Level of Process Optimization
As a further step in continuous optimization, the SAP ILM module was successfully implemented and is now in use in 80 subsidiaries across 10 countries. The objective was to streamline the system landscape as part of the migration to SAP HANA while simultaneously supporting compliance and business department requirements more efficiently.
Through the use of ILM policies, a significant portion of data was offloaded from the SAP database. The result:
- Noticeable savings in HANA storage costs
- Significantly faster month-end closing processes
- Automated, audit-compliant management of personal data throughout its entire lifecycle
In addition, legal departments benefit from direct, audit-compliant access to archived documents – without involving IT. Business processes were relieved, and processing times were further reduced.
From a performance perspective, SAP ILM also offers measurable advantages:
- Faster transactional processing due to reduced database sizes
- More efficient reporting as well as faster batch and background processing
Added Value at a Glance
- Stable batch processing even with very high parallelism
- Reduction of timeouts and peak loads
- Transparent control of system utilization
- Savings in infrastructure and operating costs
- Future-proof, internationally scalable archiving architecture
Efficiency, Costs, and Compliance in Harmony
This case study demonstrates how the electronics corporation successfully addressed performance challenges with the SAP-certified archiving software from inPuncto, strategically optimized its SAP system landscape, and sustainably aligned compliance, cost efficiency, and business requirements.
Benefit as well from a SAP-certified archiving solution – stable, secure, and cost-efficient. Contact our sales team for a non-binding consultation or an individual offer.