bayer customer profile

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

WWhat 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 PastThe 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

INNOVATIVE. ESSENTIAL.COLLABORATIVE.Orange County Convention Center | Orlando, Florida | May 14-16, 2012

At SAPPHIRE NOW and ASUG Annual Conference, you’ll learn how to innovate now, optimize your SAP investment, run even better and transform your business in 2012. Benefit from customer and partner-led sessions and discussions, educational programs, and unique networking opportunities.

Don’t miss the world’s premier business technology event. Register Today at http://sapandasug.com/wis

SapphireNow_AC_ad_2012_final.indd 1 2/7/2012 10:20:02 AM

SubScribe today. ViSit inSiderProFiLeS.wiSPubS.com.

This article appeared in the APR MAY JUN 2012 issue of insiderPROFILES (http://insiderPROFILES.wispubs.com) and appears here with permission from WIS PUBLISHING.

At a GlanceBayer 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 R&D)

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 EH&S• 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


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 RepositoryBayer 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)Ben

efits

of

SA

P N

etW

eave

r IL

M
