| # Archiving Concept Companies spend time developing procedures for entering data into an ERP system. They also spend time developing procedures for archiving manuals, drawings, specs, and other hard-copy documents. However, in many cases they do not spend time on procedures to store historical electronic data. This document creates an awareness of archiving electronic data, not as a technical solution, but as an integral part of your business processes. You can use this document to guide you through the complete archiving process. What is archiving? 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 LN 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, such as a tape, DVD or CD-ROM. ERP LN 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. For more information on these archiving sessions, refer to chapter 3, “Archiving Logistical Data,” and chapter 4, “Archiving Financial Data.” However, before you archive data, you must define an appropriate archiving strategy and plan, which must be a team process. The result is that a documented strategy and plan must be communicated throughout the organization. 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. What data can 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. Usually, you have three options: Archiving and deleting (1) Deleting (2) Archiving only (3) Using option 1 or 2 makes archiving irreversible. For example, if you archive only because you want to preview the results, the archiving can be done a number of times. 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 also depend 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. 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 ERP LN 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 LN functionality After you list all your requirements, the next step is to verify whether the standard ERP LN functionality is sufficient to facilitate your needs. Usually, ERP LN 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 live 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. Archive environment Based on the current operational company structure, available disk space, and the defined strategy, you must decide how your archive environment must be set up. How many companies do you need? Do you want to store the archived data on an external medium? Do you want one archive company for each fiscal year, or one archive company for several years? If you want to archive data the right way, you need to have enough storage space available. Your archive environment setup must match that of the operational environment. Therefore, if you have a multi-logistic – single-finance structure, the archive company structure must also be multi-logistic – single finance. Test plan In the archiving plan, you must consider testing. Testing can be extremely helpful. For example, it is one way to train regular users and key users to check whether your archive setup is correct, to check whether the data is consistent, and ensure functionality of archiving sessions meets your expectations. For best results, you must perform the testing in a test environment, rather than in the operational environment. Your test plan must at least contain what you want to test, who will perform the testing, and when. Additionally, you must define validation parameters: what must be checked before the test results are accepted. Operational plan In operational plan, you must address the following issues: Preparation of data. Frequency and sequence of archiving/deleting data (for each session). Incorporating archiving in procedures (day-to-day business). Creation of a backup before archiving a large quantity of data. Impact of customizations: Do you need to change the archiving sessions or develop new sessions? Check for latest solutions to implement. Include a schedule for these types of activities and assign activities to functions or individual users. Implementation The next step in the archiving process is the implementation of the archiving plan. In this phase you will implement the plan you defined in the previous steps. The result of this step will be the actual movement of historical data from your operational company to your archive company, not as a technical solution to a problem, but as a new process as part of your day-to-day business. The following chapters discuss the technical setup and functional archiving sessions in more detail, and help you archive data in a correct and safe way. |