Industry: Transport & Logistics
Use Case: SAP ECC Data Archiving, soffcont1 Document Migration
Product: Archon Data Store (ADS)
The Situation: 45 TB, a Pending HANA Migration, and Millions of Documents with No Exit Strategy
For a high-volume transport and logistics business, SAP is the operational backbone. Every shipment, invoice, delivery note, and workflow document passes through it. Over years of growth, that adds up and for this organization, it added up to more than 45 TB across SAP ECC and BW, with millions of documents (PDFs, GIFs, JPGs, mail objects) stored in the soffcont1 content repository alone.
The organization had reached a tipping point. Database bloat was a performance liability. An S/4HANA migration was on the roadmap, and running it against a 45 TB database wasn’t just expensive, it wasn’t realistic. Something had to go. But nothing could be lost.
The Challenge: Archiving the Transactions Wasn’t the Hard Part — Moving the Content Was
The scope was more complex than a straightforward data archiving project. Two distinct workstreams had to run in parallel:
- SAP Data Archiving across ECC and BW using a full suite of functional and technical archiving objects
- Migration of the entire soffcont1 content repository including PDFs, GIFs, JPGs, mail, and associated workflow documents to an external archive server
The technical challenge: soffcont1 doesn’t archive itself. Every document in the table is tied to a business object (a purchase order, an invoice, a delivery). Archiving the transactional data without moving the linked content creates orphaned records. Moving the content without a validated link to the business object creates an audit gap. Both had to happen together, correctly, first time.
On top of the technical complexity, the project demanded tight coordination with functional teams across FI, CO, MM, SD, and logistics to define retention periods, validate archiving objects, and sign off test results, all against a fixed project deadline.
“Archiving the transactions without moving the content creates orphaned records. Moving the content without validated links creates an audit gap. Both had to happen together.”
— Archon Implementation Team
What Archon Did: End-to-End Archiving Across ECC, BW, and soffcont1
Archon took end-to-end ownership and designed the archiving strategy from scratch, owned the execution, and signed off on results — across two parallel workstreams running simultaneously against a fixed deadline. The engagement covered:
- Preparation of the full SAP Data Archiving strategy and design blueprint
- Configuration of all functional and technical archiving objects across ECC and BW
- soffcont1 migration: extraction, metadata validation, content transfer to archive server, and link verification for all document types
- Cross-functional coordination with business and IT teams to define retention parameters and achieve signoff within project timelines
- End-to-end test execution and results validation before any production archiving run
THE RESULTS
| Outcome | Detail |
|---|---|
| 27 TB migrated | The entire soffcont1 table content successfully migrated to archive server with validated metadata links. |
| 10 TB reclaimed | Archiving objects across ECC and BW removed approximately 10 TB of transactional data from the live database, with full retention compliance. |
| ~37 TB total reduction | Combined impact: a database that was operationally unmanageable is now right-sized for S/4HANA migration planning. |
| Zero data loss | All document-to-business-object links preserved and validated post-migration. No orphaned records or audit gaps. |
| On-schedule delivery | Delivered against the project deadline, coordinating across multiple functional and technical workstreams simultaneously. |
WHY IT MATTERS
SAP archiving projects fail for two reasons: underestimating the content migration complexity, or treating archiving as a purely technical exercise disconnected from business retention requirements. This engagement required both and we delivered both. The result isn’t just a smaller database but a defensible, auditable, compliant archive that the business can access and trust.
If you’re carrying unarchived transactional data and document content into an S/4HANA migration, you’re carrying it at HANA pricing. Archon has run this engagement before across ECC, BW, and soffcont1 and knows exactly where the complexity hides.
