SAP archiving landscape successfully upgraded

The University of Göttingen's Faculty of Medicine and the University Hospital Göttingen operate together under the umbrella "University Medical Center Göttingen". The goal of this integrated structure is to establish close collaboration at an organizational level between the Faculty of Medicine and the University Hospital with regard to healthcare, teaching and research. With over 40 clinical departments, an equal number of polyclinics and a large number of special consultation services, the UMG represents all basic medical disciplines and a wide spectrum of specialized disciplines in diagnostics and therapy. Each year, approximately 60,000 inpatients and 173,000 outpatients are treated at the University Hospital. Individual specialized disciplines provide medical care to patients from far beyond southern Lower Saxony and the adjoining federal states.

The challenges of digital archiving

The University Medical Center Göttingen had already been using an archiving solution for archiving SAP-related documents and records since 2006. The functionality of the existing archiving solution was no longer sufficient to cope with current demands and it became clear the system would be unsustainable unless extensive upgrades were carried out. "We wanted a modern, stable, and, above all, future-proof archiving solution for our SAP system," says Dr. Günther Juretzka, deputy head of IT at the UMG. To ensure that its data would continue to be managed effectively, the UMG decided to switch to an archiving solution offered by EASY SOFTWARE AG. The UMG once again turned to its long-term support partner Sycor for collaboration on this project. "We have successfully worked together with Sycor in the past. That's why both sides have a great deal of confidence in the partnership. Without Sycor at our side as an expert service provider, we wouldn't have been able to carry out the changeover to the new system and the migration of our data so quickly and successfully," continues Dr. Juretzka. The archiving solution will primarily be used to support business processes such as invoicing. It will also be used to file electronic personnel files and for various SAP archiving standard pro-cesses. The key requirement of the project was replacing the old archive and migrating the old data to the new solution. In just a short period of time, a total of over 4 million documents were transferred to the new system.

Rapid integration

The changeover to the new archiving solution meant that a concept for the new EASY landscape needed to be developed first. The migration concept was then created based on this. From there, Sycor undertook the installation, setup and integration of the solution and also performed the document migration. "In a period of three months, we implemented and set up the new system and carried out the data migration," says Bengt Mitzinneck, project manager at Sycor.

Over 4 million records migrated

In addition to the large volume of documents, a further challenge was migrating all of the documents completely and securely and in line with legal requirements. Plus, there needed to be as little interruption to the UMG's ongoing operations as possible. The documents remained accessible throughout the entire migration, regardless of whether they had already been transferred or were still located in the old archive. The structure of the existing documents in the old archives and interfaces to third party systems were simply carried over and linked to the new archive. "The overall concept of the solution, like its simple structure and the availability of a large number of additional components, speaks for itself. That's why we are already considering mapping further SAP archiving scenarios with the EASY solution," says Dr. Günther Juretzka.