Friesland Campina is a world’s largest dairy farm, based out of Netherlands. Supports nearly ~14K formers spread across Netherlands, Belgium, France and Germany.

Executive Summary –

An enterprise successfully migrated vast, fragmented data from decentralized SAP Content Servers (MaxDB) across 12 systems to a unified OpenText Core Archive solution. The project addressed complex challenges involving 50+ repositories, various document formats (KPRO, ArchiveLink, DMS), and achieved near-zero downtime migration and consolidation. The strategy employed a multi-pronged approach tailored to different data types, utilizing phased deployment for a seamless transition.

Business Requirement –

Consolidation of the archiving solution by migrating the ~10 TB of the archived content.

Objective & Scope -

• Migration of unstructured and structured archived data from SAP Content Servers to OpenText Core archive solution.
• Stabilize the SAP DB growth by implementing the SAP Data Archiving.

Business Challenge -

• Complex legacy architecture as the archived data is generating from multiple SAP systems (4 PROD systems with 3 system landscape – Total ~12 SAP Systems).
• Archived data stored in SAP Content Servers (Max DB as storage) – Individual SIDs.
• Huge administrative efforts as multiple SAP Content Servers exist (~10 SIDs including non-prod and PROD exists).

Types of content –

• Multiple archiving methods involved –
a. SAP Data Archiving files – ~1 TB of archiving files b. KPRO attachments (SOFFCONT1 table content) – 13.5 million attachments c. ArchiveLink attachments – 35 million attachments d. DMS Documents – 200000 Documents
• Multiple document types exist in the source like PDF, WORD, TIFF and JPEG etc.,

Solution Approach –

• Phased migration as many SAP systems and SAP Content Servers exist.
• 2 OpenText Core Archive installations for NON-PROD and PROD environments.
• As-Is assessment of the SAP Systems to finalize the scope of the migration, based on
a. Content repositories b. Storage categories c. ArchiveLink tables d. Relationship tables
• Migration of the archived content from SAP Content Server to OpenText Core Archive – Using several SAP standard and custom reports as different types of content exist.
• Custom program development for migration of the SAP Data Archiving files.
• SAP Data Archiving implementation for newer Archiving Objects.
• Consolidation of the content repositories.

Key implementation challenges -

• ~ 50+ content repositories from the source considered for the migration.
• Impact on the SAP system performance due to huge archiving data.
• Stake holders’ co-ordination as multiple parties involved.
• Validation of the migration from source to target.
• Unstructured data storage and access via custom transactions.
• Missing/non-migratable documents findings from the source.
• Consolidation of the repositories from source to target.
• Switch over of the solution from SAP Content Server to OpenText with near zero impact on the business.
• Business training or train the trainer methods to make business familiar with the new repository/storage category names.
• Non-PROD SAP Content Server migration, as most of the content would not be eligible for migration due to SAP system refreshes.
• Right test data availability in non-prod systems.

Mitigation –

• End to end data reconciliation to ensure migration accuracy –
a. Validation of the number of records from source to target repositories.
• Re-execution of the migration reports only for the failure records.
• Rigorous cross-checking
a. Some of the documents which are deleted by the users b. Missing content at source c. Corrupted files/content d. Invalidated archiving sessions
• Parallel execution of the migration reports and scheduling of the jobs in non-business critical hours to avoid the system performance impact.

Business value –

• Zero downtime success.
• Overall activity delivered with in 5 months from Planning to migration.
• Modernized and low maintenance archiving.
• Migration of the content without impacting the system performance.