SAP users getting caught in upgrade data backlog problem

That's the chief conclusion of a new European survey by Macro 4. It finds 90% of the 135 SAP users from the UK, France and Spain, who participated in the survey, admitted that performing upgrades was a challenge. Their main issues included the time that upgrades consume (mentioned by 73%), the complexity involved (60%), and staffing resources (50%). 41% of respondents were worried about the risk of system failure following an upgrade and 39% were also concerned about potential loss of data. Interestingly, 67% of those questioned revealed that a significant proportion of the data sitting in their SAP systems is static or historical information, and that this is one of the chief causes of problems. Lynda Kershaw, marketing manager at Macro 4, says: "Our experience is that older information, which is very seldom accessed, constitutes as much as 80% of SAP data for many users. Yet only 43% of those we questioned said they currently archive this inactive data away from the system – in the UK and Spain the figures were 36 and 31%. This probably plays a big part in why upgrades are seen as so painful." She emphasises that the bigger the SAP database, the more information has to be migrated for upgrade – and the more time, complexity and risk involved. "It really pays to use archiving to keep your database lean, as SAP itself recommends. And with less data in the system, you'll also benefit from faster responses, shorter backup and restore times and lower storage costs." Macro 4 reckons that upgrading to SAP ERP 6.0 can also involve a significant increase in the size of the SAP database, making archiving even more important for optimising performance and controlling storage costs: "Because of the way SAP 6.0 organises data within the database and because upgrading will involve converting to the Unicode encoding methodology, this can lead to an increase in the volume of data. An SAP 4.6c system has around 32,000 database tables while the new SAP 6.0 version can have up to 100,000, for example," explains Kershaw.