24.03.2009

Delivering Greater Business Value through Archiving

By: Tulin Pledger, Director, EMEA & APAC Marketing at ASG

SAP NetWeaver and SAP ArchiveLink, together with complimentary software technology, allow organizations to build repositories that seamlessly integrate SAP and non-SAP content for a unified view of business-critical information. As a result, business users can take faster action and make better decisions – without ever having to leave the SAP environment.

Archiving is a critical activity for any enterprise. But for IT and business managers alike, it has all too often remained a low priority, conjuring up images of dusty tape silos that are seldom accessed. Yet the repository can – and should – be an enhancement and extension of the online production system. It allows production applications to execute more efficiently, and it provides real-time access to data and documents that no longer need to reside in the production system.

Fortunately, organizations with SAP IT landscapes have the built-in functionality to extend the capability of their SAP applications. This not only improves business processes, system performance and enterprise integration, but it also satisfies the requirements of a repository for regulatory compliance.

SAP NetWeaver, the SAP technology platform, and SAP ArchiveLink, an SAP NetWeaver Application Server service that links archived and application documents, work together to provide the required set of archiving interfaces and technology infrastructure. With them, businesses can implement solutions that give employees the ability to view, download, and print documents, reports, and images in any format without logging on to a separate application or leaving the SAP environment.

By extending the capability of SAP applications, businesses can use archiving to improve business processes, system performance, regulatory compliance, and enterprise integration.

Benefits of data archiving

Data archiving gives businesses a rich set of opportunities to save time, money, and effort. At the same time, it can also help safeguard the integrity of company information and meet the requirements imposed by new data retention regulations.

1. System availability
   Archiving cuts the time it takes for database operations to complete.
2. Storage savings
   Well-designed archiving solutions actually reduce storage costs by consuming less disk space, memory, main memory, and CPU power.
3. System performance
   Archiving data reduces the overall amount of I/O to speed up the system.
4. Governance issues
   An overall integrated information lifecycle management solution is critical in addressing the enormous increase in legal and compliance requirements.

Benefits of document archiving

Document archiving plays an equally important role by helping businesses organize, store and disseminate information to all of an organization’s stakeholders:

1. Deliver a common portal to integrate enterprise information
   Document archives enable an organization to unify the enterprise. They provide employees, partners and customers, for example, with Web- or network-based portal access to SAP documents, reports and production data as well as non-SAP generated content.
2. Improve business process management
   A document archiving solution ties an organization’s documents to associated business objects within SAP and to the business processes that use them.
3. Make documents from back-office systems available for customers and partners
   By bridging the gap between back-office and front-office systems, businesses can build stronger relationships with customers and partners by offering them access to transaction and account information.
4. Reduce the expensive and inefficient process of manual paper handling
   The right document archiving technology supports documents created in many different IT platform formats, regardless of the application that generated them. This transforms the paper trail into a well-organized document archive.
5. Eliminate the risk of misfiled documents
   Document archiving captures, indexes and stores documents across the entire enterprise to reduce compliance risk and inefficiency. It also provides powerful search capabilities, personalized views of enterprise documents, and automated distribution.

Faster action. Better Decisions.

A comprehensive, integrated archiving system adds measurable business value throughout an organization’s value chain. And with the technical interface infrastructure inherent in SAP NetWeaver and SAP ArchiveLink, SAP users have a head start in building a system that is scalable and sustainable for the long term.

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