What is often regarded as a purely technical side aspect turns out to be the biggest hidden cost brake in practice. This unstructured data, unclear authorizations, duplicate storage and historically grown ECM systems not only drive up expenses — they also jeopardize the stability, performance and compliance of the new S/4 environment.

This is exactly where an intelligent archiving strategy comes in.
With tia®, partners can help their customers create order before the actual migration — efficiently, legally secure and without additional effort for the project team. The archive separates operational data from information to be retained over the long term and thus creates a lean, high-performance basis for S/4 conversion.

Why is that so important?

1. Reduce costs — sustainably and measurably
Every gigabyte of data load that is not transferred to S/4 saves resources: less cloud costs, shorter load times, less complexity. Many companies report significant savings through clear archiving rules and the outsourcing of historical data alone.

2. Ensuring compliance
Retention periods don't end just because a migration is pending. Clean archiving ensures that documents are retained in an audit-proof manner — regardless of the future operating model.

3. Minimize project risk
The more data migrates unfiltered into the new environment, the greater the risk of errors, performance problems, or project delays. Upstream archiving removes these risks and gives project teams stability.

For partners, this results in a valuable consulting approach:
Archiving is becoming a sales lever because it can be integrated directly into ongoing migration projects and provides customers with immediately noticeable benefits. At the same time, it opens the door to follow-up projects — such as modernizing old ECM systems, introducing modern interfaces, or using the cloud.

Many decision makers are surprised how much strategic potential there is in archiving. Anyone who, as a partner, points out the importance of a lean database at an early stage is not only technically competent, but also economically proactive.

S/4HANA migration doesn't just mean modernizing systems — it means taking responsibility for your own data landscape. And this is exactly where sustainability starts.

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