Read this Insider Profile article to know how Bayer IT collaborates with solution extensions from SAP to manage Data Retention and Archiving. For more information on SAP Document Access and Archiving by OpenText, please visit http://www54.sap.com/solutions/analytics/enterprise-information-management/software/documents-access-archiving/index

1. When Is It Time to Decommission Systems and
Destroy Data?Bayer IT Collaborates with the Business on Data Retention and Archiving
by David Hannon, Features Editor
W
What is the most efficient way to eliminate data that is no
longer required for business purposes? And what is the best
method for archiving the data that the business doesn’t need
to access regularly? These are difficult questions for any
company to answer.
When science giant Bayer Corporation, a longtime SAP
customer, decided to upgrade its SAP ERP software in North
America, the business had to decide the best way to archive
its legacy data and decommission the old systems to ensure
that system users’ needs would still be met.
System decommissioning and archiving are parts of the
ERP migration process that often get lost in the shadow of
a new system deployment — when most people involved in
the implementation focus on the potential benefits that the
new environment will bring. However, Bill Murdoch, IT Busi-
ness Solutions Consultant at Bayer Business and Technology
Services, points out the risk of keeping an old system alive.
“Many companies lock down the old system, but users can
still access it and change historical data,” Murdoch says.“For
example, they could enter information into the old database,
which could create problems going forward.”
But decommissioning an older ERP system isn’t as easy as
flipping a switch. IT teams must consider regulatory com-
pliance issues when taking a system offline. In the US, IRS
guidelines stipulate that data must be kept as long as it may
be material to the business, and records must be able to be
read by computers, not just people. From a business perspec-
tive, companies need to determine what historical data it will
retain and destroy, and any data it chooses to remove has to
be eliminated in a systematic, documented process.
So, while most people on the Business and Technology
Services team at Bayer were looking forward — focusing
on the new solutions during the SAP ERP upgrade — some
team members were dutifully looking backward at old data,
asking users about its possible uses, and considering how
the organization would handle archiving and decommis-
sioning. They determined that the business could use the
SAP NetWeaver Information Lifecycle Management (SAP
NetWeaver ILM) application for storing data from the sys-
tem being decommissioned, as well as for archiving data in
the new live system.
But before that could happen, the team had some key
decisions to make.
Predicting the Future, Documenting the Past
The first step the team took in decommissioning its previous
SAP environment was to meet with each Bayer business unit
and determine what data it might need down the road. And
according to Murdoch, the answer from business users was
often,“All of it.”
“We asked users to project what they would be doing down
the road, and it’s hard to predict the future,” he says.“So we
Tom Ginocchi
BBS Manager
Bill Murdoch
IT Business Solutions Consultant
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This article appeared in the APR MAY JUN 2012 issue
of insiderPROFILES (http://insiderPROFILES.wispubs.com)
and appears here with permission from WIS PUBLISHING.

2. At a Glance
Bayer in North America
Region headquarters: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Industry: Pharmaceuticals, Crop Science, and
Material Science
Revenue: 8.2B Euro
Employees: 15,800 (2,800+ involved in RD)
Global affiliation:
• Bayer AG, an international health care, nutri-
tion, and high-tech materials group based in
Leverkusen, Germany, with total sales of $36.5
billion and 111,800 employees (fiscal 2011)
• SAP customer since mid-1990s
SAP solutions:
• SAP ERP 6.0
• SAP NetWeaver ILM
• SAP NetWeaver BW
• SAP NetWeaver PI
• SAP SCM
• SAP CRM
• SAP SRM
• SAP EHS
• SAP Recruiting
• SAP BusinessObjects solutions
worked with them to gather requirements and determine
what they really needed from the old system, and we for-
mulated user acceptance tests to help confirm we were
meeting their requirements.”
During those meetings, system users learned exactly
what would be decommissioned and how that would
impact their individual business. The team left each
meeting with an exhaustive list of what users required ac-
cess to and at what level. In some cases, the team had to
distinguish user needs from wants.
“Users didn’t actually need access to the old system,”
Murdoch explains. “They just needed to realize the data
would still be available to them in the new environment
in other ways. For example, static data from a report
that a user might need in the future could be saved into a
repository.”
From there, the archiving and decommissioning strat-
egy using SAP NetWeaver ILM could be fine tuned based
on the business needs. Fortunately, the US system was not
the first to go into the repository, and the team was able
to base its strategy on existing analysis, planning, and user
acceptance testing documentation from the prior Bayer
AG decommissioning of a five-country system.
After migrating the data to SAP NetWeaver ILM, the
team went back to the business users to confirm they
could access the data they requested. “For instance, we
asked them how many invoices they had originally, and
then showed what we archived to prove the numbers
matched,” Murdoch says.“If they didn’t match, we looked
into why and fixed it. Quite often, it was simply retrieval
selection criteria.”
Validating that the data was still available, just in a dif-
ferent place, helped put users’ minds at ease and made
them feel more comfortable with the new environment.
Murdoch says it also gave the IT team a chance to show
users how to access the archived data and how long it might
take. For compressed data that users only need to access
from the archive a couple times a year, the response time
is slower than in a live system. And setting that expectation
with users early on avoids a lot of issues down the road.
Setting “Useful Life” Guidelines
One word that business users don’t like to hear when it
comes to data is “destruction.” For the most part, Murdoch
says, users want to save all data, just in case they need it at
some point in the future. But digital storage and archiving
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3. is not infinite or free. Data’s useful
life expires at some point, and com-
panies set policies to outline how
long to store non-essential data —
and when to destroy it.
“The belief that data should be kept
‘as long as there is a business need’ is
not specific enough,” Murdoch says.
“So companies have to set very clear
policies and then should live by those
policies.” He says it’s best to wait five
quarters from when a system goes
to “non-productive” status before
beginning to archive and delete any
data. More extensive user acceptance
testing may be required if multiple
countries and languages are involved.
SAP NetWeaver ILM has helped
Bayer manage its internal policies
and procedures by automating the
process of data destruction based on
the company’s policies. If data is des-
ignated as reaching the end of its use-
ful life on a certain date, the applica-
tion can delete it from the archive,
minimizing risk.
“Our role is not to interpret the pol-
icies, but to help the business adhere
to them based on the requirements
given to us,” says Tom Ginocchi, BBS
Manager within Bayer Business and
Technology Services. “But when we
start asking the business units ques-
tions about how they want to act on
those policies, they become much
more aware of them. It forces them
to look at the policies to determine
how long to hold data.”
Benefits of a Single
Repository
Bayer first considered SAP NetWeaver
ILM as a way to reduce hardware costs
during archiving, but when the busi-
ness began looking at the solution as
a repository for its live data, a new set
of benefits emerged.
Ginocchi says that one of the major
advantages to using SAP NetWeaver
ILM is that it can serve as an ar-
chiving system for decommissioned
systems as well as live systems across
a range of businesses, business loca-
tions, and data types, including non-
SAP data.
“There are hidden benefits from
the aggregation of data once you
get started down that road,” says
Ginocchi. “We’re not there yet, but
we hope to archive non-SAP data and
even do some non-SAP database de-
commissioning with SAP NetWeaver
ILM as the warehouse.”
And while that initiative will re-
quire some tough questions, Bayer’s
experience has shown that asking
those questions is what brings the
biggest benefits.
“Many companies lock down the old
system, but users can still access
it and change historical data. For
example, they could enter information
into the old database, which could
create problems going forward.”
— Bill Murdoch, IT Business Solutions Consultant,
Bayer Business and Technology Services
• No risk of a powered-
down system that won’t
come back up
• No need to keep old
systems supported by
vendors
• Automatically ensures no
data update
• Retention timeframes can
be managed per policies
• One consolidated reposi-
tory for all historical data
• One source for customer
queries, legal, and audit
matters, and one system
with data expiration policy
enforcement
• Green benefits (minimizes
energy and resource
consumption)
BenefitsofSAPNetWeaverILM
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