Transitioning to S/4HANA? Don’t Take Everything with You

Why archiving before conversion can reduce migration effort and help create a leaner S/4HANA system.

Before transitioning from ECC to S/4HANA, there are several recommended steps organisations should take to help create an optimised S/4HANA environment. These include data reduction, data cleanup and archiving.

Unfortunately, because these activities add time and cost to the project, there can be a temptation to defer them until after the transition.

The apparent shortcut: migrate everything

An ECC-to-S/4HANA transition is often treated primarily as a technology project: prepare the target environment, convert the data and custom code, test, and cut over.

However, the decision about how much historical data to carry forward can materially affect the size, duration, cost and complexity of the transition.

Taking everything may feel like the safest and most cost-effective option. In practice, it can mean converting decades of aged data that users rarely need, unnecessarily bloating the new S/4HANA system.

Reducing the data footprint before conversion can shorten the conversion duration and reduce the memory required for the new environment.

Archiving is therefore not simply a housekeeping exercise to schedule after go-live. It should be part of the pre-conversion plan.

Archiving is not an IT project to be deferred to quieter times—it is the foundation and the critical success factor for a seamless S/4HANA migration.

Deciding what should be archived

Archiving is more than a technical decision, and data size should not be the only criterion. Organisations also need to consider:

• How frequently the data is accessed
• Legal and regulatory retention requirements
• What personal information should be retained, blocked or deleted
• How archived information will be retrieved when required
• Whether the underlying business process has been completed

The objective is not simply to remove as much data as possible. It is to distinguish active operational data from historical information that must remain available but does not need to remain in the live system.

Don’t overlook SAP-linked documents

Transactional data is only one part of the picture. Many ECC environments also rely on SAP-linked invoices, purchase orders, delivery documents, PDFs, scans and print lists stored outside SAP in a document archive connected through SAP ArchiveLink.

Before moving to S/4HANA, organisations should determine whether the existing archive will support the target environment.

Is it tied to ageing infrastructure? Does it depend on specialist skills? Is it restricted to a particular storage platform? Is the organisation paying for broader ECM functionality it no longer uses?

Modernise the archive alongside S/4HANA

If the existing archive needs to be replaced, the migration of archived content should be planned alongside the S/4HANA program—not discovered as a late project dependency.

The organisation must determine how historical documents and archived application data will remain accessible after the transition. It should also consider whether the move to S/4HANA creates an opportunity to simplify the archive architecture, reduce infrastructure requirements and introduce greater choice over cloud, hybrid or on-premises storage.

Where KGS tia fits

KGS Software GmbH tia provides a specialised archive for SAP documents, print lists and archived application data.

It supports ArchiveLink for SAP-linked documents, CMIS for modern content-repository integration and BC-ILM for retention-managed SAP data archives. It can operate across on-premises, cloud and hybrid environments.

Where an existing archive platform must be replaced, tia Migration supports a controlled transfer, while its proxy functionality helps maintain access to documents throughout the migration.

Take forward what the business needs

The best S/4HANA transition is not necessarily the one that carries the most history forward.

It is the one that moves the right information, preserves access to what must be retained and avoids rebuilding yesterday’s archive complexity in tomorrow’s SAP landscape.