Archiving SAP ERP Data Before Moving to the Cloud

United Farmers of Alberta

“Outboard handled the customizations brilliantly, allowing us to make Z transactions archive-relevant. The seamless nature that the product has to retrieve old and new data, even with our customizations, is one of the main reasons we chose SNP.” - Mathew Alves, Director of Enterprise Applications at United Farmers of Alberta

3/28/2023

United Farmers of Alberta red barn from above United Farmers of Alberta red barn from above

At a Glance

The Challenge

Due to performance issues related to capacity limitations of its existing on-premise SAP ERP system, the company opted to move to the cloud. UFA came to SNP to minimize the database footprint to right-size the cloud database investment.

UFA sought to focus on the largest and most business-relevant tables. This meant identifying these tables upfront and ensuring that all transactions were business-complete so that they could be archived. Additionally, many of the largest tables in UFA’s SAP environment were custom Z tables associated with UFA’s Cardlock network. Any archiving solution would have to be able to work against both standard archive-enabled business functions and custom tables.

The Benefits

  • 100% ABAP means native SAP integration

  • SAP NetWeaver-certified

  • Reduced the SAP ECC database footprint by 25%

  • The business users still have access to all archived data from within SAP

 

  • Scalable, future-proofed target agnostic storage

  • The reduced database footprint will result in requiring less ECC hardware for the cloud deployment

The Solution

SNP provided archiving expertise by guiding UFA through the process of analyzing and identifying archive-relevant tables, setting up the archive jobs, automating the process for future archiving, and ultimately deleting the data from the database.

Using SNP OUTBOARD, United Farmers of Alberta was able to significantly reduce its SAP ERP database footprint to prepare its environment for migration to the Azure Cloud. All of this was completed with minimal impact on the business.

Key Facts

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Project Type

Data Archiving

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Scope

Archiving SAP data into Azure storage

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SNP Product

SNP OUTBOARD

About United Farmers of Alberta

 

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Headquarters

Alberta, Canada

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Revenue

CAD 1.8 billion

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Industry

Agricultural supply coop

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Employees

950

Founded in 1909, United Farmers of Alberta Co-operative Limited (UFA) is one of Canada’s largest and most dynamic cooperatives. Over the years, the business has grown from a small-scale, local cooperative into an extensive commercial and retail organization with more than 110,000 active members. A progressive and diversified business, UFA is proud to provide the products, services and solutions its owners and customers need to successfully run its operations. UFA has 35 farm and ranch stores throughout Alberta and more than 100 petroleum agencies. These petroleum agencies constitute the largest Cardlock network in Alberta and offer UFA members and customers round-the-clock access to fuel every day of the year.

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