Organizations often accumulate a portfolio of legacy ERP systems as they evolve through mergers, acquisitions, and technology upgrades. While no longer in active production, these applications are frequently kept running to ensure access to historical data for legal, fiscal, or operational reasons. However, maintaining this legacy infrastructure introduces significant costs and risks that can be mitigated through a structured decommissioning strategy.
Justifications for Decommissioning
According to Data Migration International (DMI), the business case for retiring legacy systems is built on reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO) and risk mitigation. These two pillars consist of:
Total cost of ownership analysis
Legacy systems incur ongoing expenses that provide diminishing value. These costs include annual software maintenance and licensing fees, energy and real estate for data centers, and expenses for specialized hardware and personnel required to support outdated technology. By decommissioning these systems, organizations can realize TCO reductions of up to 80%, freeing up significant capital and operational budget to reinvest in strategic initiatives.
Compliance and audit risk mitigation
Legacy systems often contain sensitive historical data that must adhere to modern data retention and privacy regulations, such as GDPR. These older platforms may lack the security controls and reporting capabilities to comply with audit requests or legal discovery mandates easily. Each legacy system represents a discrete point of failure, increasing the organization’s overall compliance risk profile. Therefore, centralizing historical data from these systems into a modern, managed archive simplifies governance and ensures consistent compliance.
A Phased Roadmap
A successful decommissioning project follows a methodical, factory-like approach rather than a high-risk, one-off effort. Additionally, using a dedicated content archiving and management platform, such as JiVS, provides a structured path forward. DMI recommends a three-phased approach to decommissioning legacy systems:
Phase 1: Analysis and retention definition
This step involves analyzing the data within the legacy system to define clear retention policies. It precisely identifies which data must be preserved to meet specific business, legal, and fiscal requirements, thereby avoiding the unnecessary migration of obsolete information.
Phase 2: Data extraction and consolidation
In this phase, the JiVS platform connects to legacy SAP applications and other non-SAP sources to extract the required data, documents, and their original business context. This information is then consolidated into a single, secure, and accessible historical data archive. End-users can still query and run reports on this data, ensuring business continuity.
Phase 3: System decommissioning
Once all necessary historical data is securely archived and validated, the organization can formally decommission the legacy system and terminate the associated software licenses. This action stops the cost drain and eliminates the security and compliance risks related to the old system.
What This Means for ERP Insiders
The idea of decommissioning a system can be concerning for ERP users in business functions like finance, HR, or logistics. However, here’s how a platform-based approach addresses this while ensuring data integrity:
- Preserve the full business context, not just the data. Data integrity in an ERP system is about relationships such as an invoice linked to a customer, a purchase order, and payment records. Simply exporting tables to a spreadsheet breaks these links, rendering the data useless for audits or analysis. The JiVS platform is designed to understand the complex relational structure of SAP data. It extracts and preserves the complete business context, ensuring that when users look up an old record, they see the entire transactional history exactly as it was. This maintains the integrity of historical documents, making them reliable for legal discovery, financial audits, and long-term business analysis. As a result, audits become easy, swift, and cost effective for organizations.
- Gain self-service access without the legacy burden. A key function of a platform like JiVS is to provide an intuitive, user-friendly interface that allows business users to run reports and queries on archived data independently. This empowers them to find the information they need, when they need it, without relying on the original, costly legacy application or the IT team. Data integrity is maintained because the platform presents the information in its original, familiar format. This ensures business continuity and accessibility while allowing the expensive, underlying infrastructure to be retired.
- Accelerate your move to modern platforms like SAP S/4HANA. Application retirement is a strategic enabler for the future. Before migrating to SAP S/4HANA, organizations can use JiVS to offload decades of historical data from their legacy ECC system. This reduces the volume and complexity of the data needed to migrate. By archiving historical information first, an SAP S/4HANA implementation becomes faster, less risky, and more cost-effective. This process also ensures the integrity of the new ERP system, leading to better performance and a cleaner, more agile platform from day one.
