enhance compliance and lower costs -...

DOLPHIN WHITE PAPER LEGACY MIGRATION AND SYSTEM CONSOLIDATION

Enhance compliance and lower costs Legacy Decommissioning and System Consolidation

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The High Cost of Inertia Newton’s first Law of Motion states that, in the absence of outside forces, a body at rest will stay at rest, and a body in motion will stay in motion – indefinitely.

Companies retain legacy applications and hardware primarily to preserve access to audit, business or compliance information. Allowing legacy and non-standard systems to simply stay as they are often seems like the path of least resistance.

But there are always “outside forces”. And in this case, they all come down to cost and compliance. The path of least resistance costs the business – whether in the high cost of maintaining legacy systems or the inability of the business to take advantage of consolidated operations and data warehouses.

This Dolphin whitepaper discusses the case for system consolidation and legacy decommissioning, and the best practices approach to ensure data protection and access to legacy data while lowering overall costs.

Benefits of Legacy Decommissioning and System Consolidation with Dolphin

• Lower maintenance costs. Dolphin customers have eliminated millions of dollars in costs by effectively decommissioning mainframe and other systems.

• Seamless, continuous data access. Dolphin consolidates legacy and outside system data into the SAP data archive, so you access data the same way – and through the same search tools – as with all SAP records.

• Improved compliance. Centralized data archives and compliance tools for implementing data retention and other ILM policies.

• Lower total costs. Easier management, efficient storage, less need for specialized skills.

• SAP ILM Compatibility. The Dolphin platform is completely complementary with SAP ILM, adding the ability to manage documents and providing a platform for smart data management, capture, indexing and analytics."




The Case for Consolidation and Decommissioning

1. Reduce the Cost of Mainframe Maintenance

The cost of keeping mainframe applications running – from license fees, operational costs and specialized staff – is too high for many organizations to ignore. The watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste reported that the annual costs of mainframe software average $1.2 million – for a system that might only be accessed sporadically for audit, legal or ad hoc historical claims.1

The same is true for businesses. One Dolphin customer had more than 60 business applications running on mainframe systems. By transitioning all but a few highly specialized applications to an SAP solution and decommissioning the mainframes running them, the company was able to immediately cut $1.5 million in annual costs – making the ROI calculation for their decommissioning strategy extremely simple.

There are soft costs as well. Maintaining dozens of legacy mainframe based applications means maintaining skill sets and training on each application. For many companies, it means that every information request – from audit queries to print lists to document requests – requires IT staff assistance.

Maintaining legacy systems is rarely the most efficient or cost effective way to keep the data. In fact, maintaining these systems may well put this data at long term risk, as technology advances and the ability to access and secure data in mainframe or other out of date systems becomes increasingly rare or unavailable.

2. Consolidation Opens Opportunities

The past few years have seen a change in motivation for system consolidation. From 2004-2008, the most cited reason for legacy decommissioning was to improve compliance. In 2009 and 2010, businesses cited data processing consolidation and cost containment as primary motivators. 1 http://councilfor.cagw.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=11458




For many companies, the issue is not legacy mainframes, but simply having too many disparate applications operating across the organization. For example, a business might find itself:

• Running multiple, disconnected instances of SAP in each of its regions, or for each of its business units.

• Having business units running, through accidents of history or acquisition, multiple ERP systems (i.e., SAP and Oracle).

• Operating a mix of mainframe and open system ERP applications.

The opportunities for cost savings and the advantages of consolidating business applications under one ERP system are becoming too great to be ignored. Bringing multiple business systems together under a single application system like SAP offers a host of benefits, from eliminating unnecessary maintenance costs, quicker information access, a more efficient infrastructure, to ease of use and training. What’s more, it is an opportunity to eliminate sources of higher energy costs.

Moreover, the modern enterprise is increasingly a data-driven operation. Smart decisions require on-demand business intelligence – which means having access to combinations of sales, pricing, inventory and more. In the SAP world, BI applications rely upon queries into a consolidated SAP Business Warehouse that brings together external and internal data sources into a single data repository. From an operational standpoint, this means that maintaining “islands” of disconnected business applications and their associated databases prevents the enterprise from obtaining the real time data and analytics it needs to compete.

3. Secure and Enhance Compliance

The fear factor is what drives companies to hold onto their legacy systems. No IT director wants to tell the CFO that the financial data needed for this year’s audit is inaccessible, or that it will take two weeks to pull the data out of the archives.

The problem is that maintaining legacy applications is creating risk to this critical business information as the skills needed to maintain these aging systems become increasingly rare. Moreover, even organizations without




mainframes stretch their IT staff and budget to their limit to support multiple, redundant business applications across business units and regions.

The key issue for compliance is being able to properly manage an information lifecycle management (ILM) strategy: what data needs to be retained, how long to retain each data type, what is the residence period, how quickly must it be accessed and by whom, and when should it be removed from the system and destroyed? The answers to these questions enable IT to make decisions as to how to archive and store data in the most cost-efficient manner based on retention and access requirements.

Best Practice Solution Considerations

Consolidating data from legacy applications by leveraging your SAP system – your system of record - can lower costs, improve accessibility and maintain security. And it can improve the organization’s ability to manage its ILM strategy for cost effective data management, and retention for regulatory and business policy compliance.

Although how a company does this is unique to each company, there are some considerations for legacy migration that cut across most organizations.

• Cost effective long-term storage. Data can be placed on the most cost effective storage platform based on retention requirements and access needs.

• Uncomplicated migration. Legacy system migration is one where simple solutions are an advantage.

• Easy administration. Dolphin solutions typically enable customers to manage and access their legacy data archives the same way they manage and access the rest of their SAP archives. This minimizes training and makes administration easy for IT and end users.

Ideally, the solution also incorporates capabilities that enhance compliance, including dedicated retention management tools, electronic discovery and controlled purging.




Smart System Consolidation

Dolphin’s approach is data centric. The first decisions corporations need to make are around what data they need to preserve, why they need it, and what are the data retention policies around it.

Most companies start with any data needed for tax audits – access to this information, and having it in the right form and format is critical.

For example, an FDA regulated pharmaceuticals manufacturer we worked with had specific retention requirements and, when demanded by regulators, they needed to be able to report data exacting details on specific batches raw materials, shipments by date and location, and other PMP manufacturing data.

A heavy equipment manufacturer might need to maintain records on equipment, parts and supplies from hundreds of third-party suppliers for as long as the equipment is in use. In some instances, that could be as long as 40-50 years.

Over the course of many legacy decommissioning and system consolidation projects in the SAP environment, Dolphin has developed deep expertise and best practices to ensure seamless access to critical information, while maintaining that data in ways that are cost effective and secure. See Figure 1.

Customer Savings

Dolphin customers have seen significant cost savings. A few examples:

• A telecom manufacturer saves more than $2 million annually after decommissioning more than 100 systems.

• A leading food catering company decommissioned a mainframe accounts payable system and saves $5,000/day in hosting and support costs = $1,825,000 annually.

• A manufacturer

decommissioned just




Figure 1: Legacy data and documents stored in the archive repository. Index data is stored in the SAP database with pointers to the archive.

The Dolphin Platform for data and document management provides flexible applications, tools and best practices for optimizing the SAP environment, providing an inexpensive means to retain information and functionality from the legacy environment.

Figure 2: Dolphin Platform.




Core to Dolphin’s approach is to:

• Migrate legacy data and documents to an SAP archive repository.

• Store index information in the SAP database with pointers to the archive.

One major advantage of Dolphin’s data centric approach is that it is applicable to migration of SAP and non-SAP data alike.

In legacy migration, once the data is identified, targeted and mapped, data archiving and financial data extraction tools like DART, and a combination of outgoing document archiving, and printlist archiving, can be used to liberate data from the legacy systems into the current SAP environment.

By implementing these ArchiveLink components, you can migrate and map only the open or master data from the legacy system to the target system. Closed transactional data, outgoing business documents and most common static summary reports, can be accessed from the consolidated system archive directly via the SAP application.

The advantages are clear:

• Leverage the existing SAP landscape. By placing the legacy data in the framework of the SAP archives, you are removing information silos rather than creating new ones.

• Store data volume cost effectively in the SAP archive. This supports the ILM strategy by putting the data on the most cost effective storage system, based on retention and access requirements. A benefit to this is that no training is required to access the legacy data as it is through common SAP GUI’s.

One major advantage of Dolphin’s approach is that it is applicable to SAP and non‐SAP data alike.




• Control access through the SAP system. Authorizations are set up through SAP, taking advantage of SAP authorizations, so that there is a single point of access and management tool for controlling security and maintaining policies.

The details are unique for every business, but the process in putting together a project plan is to:

1. Identify retention requirements. This is less an IT question than a business question – what data entities need to be retained from the source legacy system. What are the retention policies and rules covering them? What are the access requirements?

2. Determine archiving strategy. The appropriate archive container for the data brought over from the legacy or consolidated system might be DART files, data archiving objects, outgoing business document types, printlist (for summary reports), or COLD document types. The same entity can be addressed by more than one container, if necessary. It is important to configure all entity-container specific components in each system before archiving. This saves pertinent information on a long term, secured ArchiveLink content repository.

3. Establish retrieval strategy. Migrate the archive links for all container instances to the consolidated system, and set up the retrieval components in the target system. Retrieval strategy should minimize the need for the end users to access same entity type for different systems from different places as much as possible. Ideally, this process occurs in parallel with the open transactional/master data migration and customizing of the new system.




Figure 3 diagrams how a common process handles data migration across multiple data types, tables, reports and unstructured data.

Figure 3: Migration Scenarios

Easy Data Access

User acceptance is one of the most often overlooked – and yet most impactful – determinants of system consolidation success. In other words, will it be easy to retrieve documents once they are in the consolidated system?

User acceptance is easier to attain when users have a single, familiar search screen that offers them access to the data they need, regardless of its original system. As illustrated in Figure 3, Dolphin makes the legacy data accessible through standard SAP search functionality such as Document Finder.




Making retrieval seamless for end users should incorporate:

• Access to specific transactions. Creating custom search fields to make it easy to reach specific records.

• Flexible search criteria. The Document Finder allows you to included a number of custom fields and reach into multiple archived systems. This includes the ability to search for data and documents and for print lists.

• Multiple systems search. If you’re searching for invoices, for example, the specific system it came from shouldn’t matter. The consolidated data can be searched all at once – and the system of origin is transparent to the end user.

Figure 4: Seamless access to archived data from multiple systems




Dolphin typically customizes SAP Document Finder screens and users add-on software to enhance search and retrieval capabilities.

Summary of the Archiving Methods

DART

An SAP standard framework for exporting static financial data in a vendor-neutral and open format for tax and audit reporting. This method can also be extremely useful for SAP-to-SAP system consolidation.

Data Archiving

Data archiving is an SAP-standard framework for serializing static data from SAP database into low-cost media. For system consolidation, the links to the archive files and associated index values from source systems are transferred to the target system. The archive files themselves do not need to be migrated or even touched.

Outgoing Documents

Outgoing document archiving is used to preserve the legal copy of business documents such as purchase orders, order confirmations, bills of lading that are sent to external business partners. This takes place at the same time as the transaction is finalized and printed, but it can be done for back-dated transactions as well.

Printlists

A Printlist is an ABAP report output saved as a document on the content repository using the ArchiveLink interface. This eliminates the need to rerun the reports or print the hard-copies for repeated access. From a consolidation point of view, all major reports should be archived with links transferred to the target system.

COLD

COLD (computer output on laser disk) technology can be used to retain data and maintain seamless access in situations where the information is difficult to consolidate due to conflicts in the data, such as mismatched master data or number ranges and provide seamless access to end users in new system.

Custom Data Archiving and Retrieval

Custom solutions deliver unique functionality, such as ad hoc queries and reports. PBS provides user-friendly methods for accessing the archived data with reporting capabilities.




The Final Analysis

Overall, legacy migration and system consolidation often represents an evolution in ILM strategy for an organization using SAP solutions. The move is from closed and disconnected systems into an open platform-based consolidated SAP application.

Legacy system migration inherently reduces costs by enabling the organization to shut down systems eliminating hardware and software costs to maintain those systems that only exist for the purpose of accessing the data. System consolidation further reduces costs, simplifies management and streamlines a company’s information lifecycle management (ILM) strategy for data retention. security policies and compliance.

Dolphin’s SAP-based platform for data and document management facilitates an approach includes: a combination of standard best practices and technologies and incorporates the unique nature of each customer environment. It involves:

• The most efficient archiving and data storage strategy for customers. There are choices, including SAP tools, third-party content management and storage options. Dolphin brings a wealth of experience in this area along with a range of tools and focused on choosing the best for each customer situation.

• Archiving expertise. Dolphin is solely focused on the SAP environment and has been helping customers implement data archiving and ILM strategy since 1995.

Business Warehouse

SAP BW is a source for ad hoc reporting of historical data. In cases where reporting must resemble on-line functionalities, storing the legacy data in SAP BW is an option that can reduce the amount of data to be migrated in conjunction with methods described above. Additionally, archiving from the BW database will reduce the size – and improve performance – of the BW database.




• Knowledge transfer and training. Dolphin’s ultimate goal is to

provide a solution that gives each customer the control they want and need. This includes a detailed plan, knowledge transfer and training so that the customer can own the process.

In other words, if an IT organization in motion stays in motion, Dolphin’s goal is to set you off in the right direction – with a seamless migration, ongoing legacy data access, lower costs and the ability to manage data and documents for the long term.

About Dolphin

Dolphin makes crucial business operations like accounts payable, accounts receivable, order management and data archiving for ERP and BW run better and smarter for organizations using SAP solutions. Founded in 1995, Dolphin produces the right solution for each customer, faster, through its unmatched experience in SAP solutions, and its proven best practices, tools and SAP add-on applications. Dolphin solutions improve business and IT performance, lower total cost of ownership and deliver high return on investment.

Based in Philadelphia, PA and San Jose, CA, Dolphin solutions are implemented across North America and around the world.

Contact Dolphin Phone: 1 (888) 305-9033 Email: contact@dolphin‐corp.com

Website: www.dolphin‐corp.com

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