Removing old, but technically incomplete documents from your system : please share your ideas and methods.

[former_member249394]

Hello SCN ILM community,

Please can you share your ideas on how to clear up (ie. archive) old, but technically incomplete documents before migrating systems. Many documents may be excluded from archiving as they are technically incomplete (for example - incorrect status) .

We know there are some SAP reports that can be used to adjust statuses of documents to make them technically possible to archive. These include SAP Note 992587 – “Manually closing completed deliveries” and SAP Note 1390145 – “Delivery can be archived with shipment still on database”, but for other application areas, I am not aware of other notes or strategies.

Many thanks in advance

Damian

[JL23 · Accepted solution]

Does SAP want to know what their customers do?

My colleague is working hard for many months already to clean such old inconsistent data, alone for purchase orders we have more than 20 different issues identified, that need individual treatment, usually ABAPs manipulating table entries (but that is nothing really different to the reports from your mentioned notes, they also do table updates). Good thing is that this data is older than 10 years and not anymore audit relevant.

If you migrate systems then it is probably very easy to define some migration rules which prevent that such items get carried over to the target system.

[former_member249394 · Accepted solution]

Hi Juergen,

Thanks for the answer. The consensus appears to be via custom ABAP reports from customer I have been in contact with also.

KR

Damian

[former_member201157 · Accepted solution]

We had similar kind of challenge in CRM systems as well. Where the status of many CRM objects like service orders, sales orders etc was not complete , hence not archivable

These type of issues are common roadblocks in data archiving projects.

Business is also not interested in taking ownership and closing these .

If there is decommission planned for this system then ILM Snapshot function might be considered .

Snapshot

Snapshots are archiving runs that are used to extract data, but not delete it, from the database. The system does not perform any checks aside from following the restrictions in the selection variant. Accordingly, these options let you write data to the archive from active business transactions that are not yet complete. To prevent data loss, snapshot runs cannot be used for deleting. A snapshot always creates redundant copies of data in the database. This function is especially useful for system shutdowns in connection with the Retention Warehouse scenario.

Bottomline is that Prevention of data loss has more importance over archiving.

[former_member190120]

SAP's SLO group does exactly this kind of work.  You may want to check with them.

Best Regards,

Karin Tillotson

[former_member249394]

HI Karin,

Thanks for the reply.

Some customers are using the SLO route, but others are using custom ABAP route for old documents (possibly those past retention times) also.

KR

Damian