Global Specialty Chemical Business Spin-Off – Quote I
As part of a global divestiture, with over 32 involved countries across five continents, the SolutionXchg team supported a 8 month long effort to separate all business documents of a global specialty chemical business from its parent company. Under strong restrictions regarding possible performance impacts on an ailing Documentum system that suffered almost daily interruptions and with minimal impact on the business operations of the parent company, we separated 12.1 million documents from a parent company archive of 34.5 million. Moving from an on-premise environment to a Cloud environment with limit performance required precise planning and a 24 hour operation to maximize throughput and keep the project on track, having all document migrated in time for a full big-bang go-live.
“Thank you Jochen! What a big effort! You did really great! What a great job from all of you! We are highly satisfied with the Document Migration. And thanks for checking on again. We believe we captured all documents in our migration – no tickets on missing documents, even 6 months later. Thanks again for all your great work!”
There are multiple real live application scenarios that can be supported by the ACC to enhance a given SAP archiving landscape or to facilitate specific transitory functions during a migration process.
Typical application scenarios:
Serving as a proxy during an archive migration by sending r/w calls to the target repository and sending read-only calls the source repository, while actively migrating in the background. This allows switching to the target repository on day one and guaranties a fully user transparent transition.
Supporting partial archive copies during company mergers and splits by functioning as a security gateway, restricting call for copies to selected documents and selected repositories only.
Forwarding (unchanged), securing (HTTPS) and/or signing (SAP SecKey) calls to a new target repository without changing the configuration or coding of the triggering application.
Supporting split storage setups, with a section of the archive in a cloud base reduced access location and another section in a high availability on premise location.
The Archive Content Connector (ACC) is an HTTP Servlet that connects one SAP system to several SAP ArchiveLink content repositories. In a round robin schema, it attempts to handle a call by forwarding to real repositories, possibly manufactured by different vendors, in sequence. The first successful response is passed back to the caller (usually an SAP system).
Additional features include:
Restricting access to listed repositories only
Restricting/allowing read/write/delete access to repositories
Restricting access to only certain document ids (whitelisting)
Obscuring document content while verifying the existence of a document (placeholder display)
Forwarding calls to a specific archive system through URL rewrite (IP address, service name, port number)
Adding HTTPS security to the transmission
Adding/replacing SAP SecKey identification, including link expiration to unsecured calls with custom security certificate
Coming in at the eleventh hour, 2 month before the planned completion date of the divestiture, SolutionXchg set up a successful PoC within just two weeks and started the migration process. Working long hours in a continuous 24-hour operation, 7.35 million documents were migrated on time and on budget, utilizing the SolutionXchg ACC Whitelisting Tool to protect the source archive and the KGS Proxy to allow immediate access to all documents even while the migration was in process:
“I wanted to let you know, that we are highly satisfied with your work and with the project over all: we never worried about you, we never checked on you, you completed your job, you completed it on time, way ahead of schedule. You can have a reference any time from us!”
Coming in at the eleventh hour, 2 month before the planned completion date of the divestiture, SolutionXchg set up a successful PoC within just two weeks and started the migration process. Working long hours in a continuous 24-hour operation, 7.35 million documents were migrated on time and on budget, utilizing the SolutionXchg ACC Whitelisting Tool to protect the source archive and the KGS Proxy to allow immediate access to all documents even while the migration was in process:
“You were a wonderful vendor to work with. The way you work as a team should be an example for all the other teams on the project. You have gone above and beyond to ensure the project was a success!”
SolutionXchg managed the archive replacement project, helping the company cut archival costs by $700K over a five-year span. When the manufacturer decided to split into two companies along its product lines in 2016, they again brought in SolutionXchg. The result: additional benefits in cost and time savings, and the companies are positioned for seamless transitions to future archive storage technologies:
“We made our migration deadline, but best of all we delivered a new archival landscape with an efficient architecture that was greatly simplified from the previous version.”
Multinational Consumer Goods Company Reduces Maintenance Costs by More Than 75% with SAP-Certified Archival Solution
A globally recognized consumer goods company realized that if it could take the risk out of migrating to a new archival system, it could accrue hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in maintenance fee savings, while gaining functionality. In this white paper, learn how the company found an extremely low-risk solution and, following a remarkably smooth and successful migration, now archives financial information at a fraction of the cost associated with its legacy system. In fact, the first-year maintenance fee savings alone paid for the investment. Learn about the company’s experience, and how you can achieve:
Significant savings in maintenance costs
Full compliance documentation built into the process
Worry-free document and data migration
Simplified architecture and reduced TCO
5-minute production cutover with no performance impact on your SAP system during migration
A migration process that is fully transparent to end users
