Infor LN & Baan Tips & Tricks for TECHNOLOGY: Archiving Concept
Companies are developing procedures for entering data into an ERP system and for archiving manuals, drawings, specs, and other hard-copy documents. However, in many cases there is no defined procedures to store historical electronic data. Archiving electronic data should be an integral part of your business processes.
Generally, archiving is the process of moving historical data from the operational environment to a special archive environment. At home, you might move old bank statements from a closet in your study to a box in the attic. At the office, you might store old hard copies of purchase orders in a room far from your own desk. Just because you no longer need the information in your daily work, does not mean you can dispose of the information. In terms of electronic data in your ERP system, archiving means moving historic data from the operational company to a special archive company; in that way, the historic data will be out of your way and safely stored. To free up disk space on your machine after you have archived the data, you can also move the historic data to an external medium.
Archiving strategy:
Archiving historical data is an irreversible process. After data is moved to the archive company, the data can no longer be uploaded back into the operational company. Archiving has a direct effect on the accessibility and availability of information; therefore, you must define a robust archiving strategy which addresses three major topics: What, When, and Who.
Business requirements:
Your business requirements determine what must be stored and for how long. For example, if you have a warranty situation on your projects for five years, you might be required to keep your project open during this time, or you may keep the project in an archive company. Therefore, if the project must remain open, no project-related information, including orders and integration transactions, can be archived.
Every business manager must decide how long what data must be stored in an operational environment for quick access. Reporting requirements must also be listed.
Legal requirements:
In most countries, legal requirements apply to financial data. Tax authorities may require financial data to be stored for a minimum number of years. Additionally, in specific lines of business such as food and beverages or aerospace, governments maintain specific legal requirements, which impact your archiving strategy.
User requirements:
Users rely on historical information. For example, a customer service employee may need to have shipment information of up to one year in the past to accurately address customer queries. These requirements must also be taken into account when you define what can be archived.
Data to be archived or deleted:
Various parties related to your company use information based on logistical and financial transactions occurring in the past. Before you archive or delete this information, you must investigate the need for the information.
Your ERP system contains standard archiving sessions in all major modules. These sessions are designed to copy historical data to the archive company, and then delete the data from the operational company.
You have three options in archiving sessions:
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Archiving and deleting: Data is transferred to the archive company and then deleted in the operational company.
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Deleting: Data is deleted in the operational company, but not archived.
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Archiving: Data is transferred to the archive company, but not deleted in the operational company.
Using option 1 or 2 makes archiving irreversible. If you archive only because you want to preview the results, the archiving can be done a number of times.
Usually, in archiving sessions, you can also specify:
- The date up to which the data must be archived
- If texts must also be archived
- If texts that already exist in the archive company must be replaced
In addition to archiving logistical and financial data, you can archive general data.
Delete sessions:
In all major modules, your ERP system contains delete sessions. These sessions only have delete functionality, no archive functionality. Consequently, they are used to clean up data in the operational company, not to transfer data to the archive company. For more information about these delete sessions, see the "Delete sessions" sections under the various modules. For example, see Delete sessions under Procurement.
After data is deleted using delete sessions, the data is no longer available in the operational company. However, parameter settings may determine whether history data is logged when you remove specific data. If required, you can archive the history using the appropriate archiving session.
When can data be archived?
Based on the answers to the previous question, you can now set a term of retaining relevant historical data in your operational environment, and a term of keeping data available in the archive environment.
Who can archive data?
Because archiving is an irreversible process, a certain risk is involved. For example, what if one of your employees starts up an archiving session by mistake? For this reason, you must determine who is authorized to archive and delete data, and then set up these authorizations with the functionality your ERP system offers.
Because no further changes must be made to archived data, access to the archive company must also be restricted to read-only authorization for most users.
Match strategy with ERP functionality:
After you list all your requirements, the next step is to verify whether the standard ERP functionality is sufficient to facilitate your needs. Usually, your ERP system provides the functionality to meet all of your needs, but must not force you to compromise. We recommend that you avoid customizing your software, however, because we are looking for long-term operational-data storage, customizations must not be ruled out entirely. An example is the requirement to show, in one report, the data from the operational company and archive company. In the current version, this is not standard functionality, but this can be important to manage your business. What can be even more important, if you are using customized software, is the question of whether the archiving sessions have been included. Do you take into account the fields and tables you have customized? Customized tables and fields may have to be included when performing delete/archive runs.
Archiving plan:
After you define an archiving strategy that suits your requirements, you can define the archiving plan. In this plan, you translate the strategy to a more operational level.
Contact Crossroads RMC— Let's take the next step together to execute your archiving plan.
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