How a Leading Aerospace and Aviation Group Reduced Its SAP Database by 35% and Unblocked an S/4HANA Migration

Industry: Aerospace / Aviation
Use Case: SAP Pre-Migration Archiving, Secure Data Lake, ERP Modernization

The Situation: An ECC Environment Growing at 80 GB a Month with No Archiving Strategy and an S/4HANA Clock Ticking

A Leading Aerospace and Aviation Group’s SAP ECC environment was growing at approximately 80 GB per month with no archiving strategy in place. For a business preparing for an S/4HANA migration, that trajectory presented a direct cost and timeline risk: HANA licensing and hardware costs are database-size-dependent, and migrating an uncontrolled, unarchived environment inflates both.

The requirement was twofold.

• First, reduce the ECC database size materially before migration, enough to make a measurable difference to HANA costs.
• Second, build something that would last: a secured data warehousing environment capable of archiving and providing access to both legacy and live data for reporting and analytics, not just a temporary holding tank.

The Challenge: No Baseline, a Moving Target Database, and 100+ Custom Objects Nobody Had Mapped

Three factors made this engagement technically demanding:

• No archiving baseline: There was no existing SAP archiving configuration, no retention policies, no archiving objects in production. Everything had to be designed and implemented from scratch.
• 80 GB/month database growth: Without archiving in place, the ECC environment was a moving target. The solution had to not just archive historical data but establish an ongoing archiving cadence that stopped the database growing unchecked.
• 100+ customizing objects: Standard SAP archiving covers standard objects. This organization’s ECC environment included more than 100 custom development objects requiring individual assessment, archiving object design, and ingestion configuration. That is a scope most archiving projects underestimate by a wide margin.

“Standard archiving covers standard objects. When your ECC environment has 100+ custom developments, you need more than a standard archiving vendor.”

— Archon Implementation Team

What Archon Did: A Greenfield Archiving Programme Built to Handle What Standard Vendors Skip

No inherited plan. No pre-built playbook handed over by the client.

Archon designed the archiving strategy from scratch, owned the execution, and signed off on results across two parallel workstreams running simultaneously against a fixed deadline.

• Full SAP Data Archiving programme: greenfield design covering both standard and custom archiving objects across the ECC landscape.
• Custom object assessment: each of the 100+ customizing objects evaluated for archivability, archiving object design where no standard equivalent existed, and ingestion pipeline configuration.
• Ongoing archiving cadence established to manage the 80 GB/month growth rate on a continuous basis, not just as a one-time exercise.
• Secured Data Lake architecture: a robust archiving and warehousing layer providing unified access to both archived legacy data and live ECC data for reporting and analytics.
• Integration design ensuring archived data remains accessible for business reporting without requiring access to the live ECC system.

The Results

Why It Matters

The conventional advice is to migrate first, archive later. This case study demonstrates why that sequence is backwards. Every terabyte migrated into HANA that should have been archived first is a terabyte paid for in licensing, hardware, and performance tuning, permanently. Archive before you migrate. The cost case is straightforward. The technical complexity is the part that requires the right partner.