At INFOCUS 19, Srixon/Cleveland Golf spoke about how the company moved from JD Edwards World to JD Edwards EnterpriseOne at a hosting center and how archiving data made the transition easier.

Does the idea of archiving your company’s data leave you overwhelmed with no idea where to begin? Cleveland Golf, a company that focuses on innovating in order to produce premier, premium products for golfers, was in the same situation until they hired Essentio Enterprise Data Management Solutions to step in. Together, the two companies were part of a story of successful data archival and purge.

Cleveland Golf and Essentio’s Partnership

Essentio has been a player in the data archival game for around 14 years. The company is known for simplifying and streamlining the archival process. A rundown of their services includes archiving, purging, disposal, sub-setting, and restoring. They also work with built-in workflows, scheduling, notifications, and security. They are a pre-integrated solution for JD Edwards and EBS data and are compatible with all versions of JDE E1, JDE World and any JDE Supported Databases.

Cleveland Golf and Essentio became acquainted in 2015, when Charles Chamberlain, Director of IT at Cleveland Golf, needed to make some decisions about the migration of data. One of the main selling points about Essentio was the company’s knowledge of the JD Edwards World and EnterpriseOne data structure. Another driver was the necessity to move quickly.

Archive or Purge? How to Decide

With over 20 years of operations in JD Edwards World on-premise, Cleveland Golf’s data fit into three categories:

1. Migrate
2. Archive
3. Purge

The company decided to archive data that had been collected over three years prior and purge that which was older than seven years. Essentio archived the appropriate data, allowing Cleveland Golf to migrate a smaller data set to the Cloud. This sped up the migration and made it more affordable overall.

Next, Essentio installed their product in the Cloud so Cleveland Golf could perform archival on an ongoing basis. Four years later, they archive date once per year. Chamberlain said that it takes about one hour to archive and allows the Cloud storage to remain roughly the same size from year to year. The archived data does not need to be accessed often, so it is stored in a less expensive space with lower quality processing. This way, Cleveland Golf retains access without paying too high of a premium.

The image below shows a timeline of Cleveland Golf’s data archival project:

Building Your Archiving Project Plan

If you follow in the footsteps of Cleveland Golf, your data archiving will take place before your migration. However, there are other options.

To give a tangible analogy, consider that you are moving houses. You have lived in your current house for 20 years, and the basement is filled with boxes that haven’t been opened in quite a while. You are not even certain what is in the boxes. Are you going to sift through all of the boxes in order to decide what moves versus gets donated or thrown away, or will you take measures to move every single box to the new house without unpacking one? The latter will cost more in moving expenses and require more storage in the new space. That is why Essentio recommends taking inventory of your data and dispersing it as necessary before paying to move it to the Cloud.

It is a good idea to consider the stakeholders before archiving in preparation for a move to the Cloud. For Cleveland Golf, there were three main players:

1. Finance
2. IT
3. Operations

Finance reviewed requirement documents in order to develop an answer for age and condition questions. They also tested results to be signed and approved by all stakeholders to ensure clear communication.

The IT team coordinated resources. They also provisioned credentials, access, and hardware, and developed the data retention policy.

Finally, Operations also reviewed requirements documents and test results along with Finance.

These stakeholders continue to be involved as Chamberlain does the annual archival.

To build your archiving project plan, follow these three steps:

1. Identify the data you want to move.
2. Create a test plan.
3. Run tests in the stage environment.

Step 1: Identify the data you want to move.

As you check into the virtual basement of your company, you should consider two primary topics for archival application:

1. Age of data
2. Condition of data

Age of Data

For most companies, the age of data to be archived is based on your lawyer’s recommendations. Cleveland Golf’s legal team required that seven years of data be retained. Anything older could be purged. Based off of legal requirements in your region, you may decide to keep data for a shorter or longer period of time. Most retention policies are written in terms of physical paper document storage, meaning you may have some negotiation options for electronic data.

Condition of Data

This may vary by the nature of the data itself. In the case of Cleveland Golf, purchase orders can remain open for more than three years. A purchase order should not be archived if it is still active. Therefore, the data with open POs was identified as migratory.

Step 2: Create a test plan.

Your options for a test plan are to take either an IT-focused approach or a user-focused one. Essentio recommends the user-focused approach. Consider notifying your users of their access to data that is five years old and younger. At the end of each year, run a report to see how many users actually accessed the five-year-old data. If it was a very low number, you may be able to adjust to a four-year policy.

Step 3: Run tests in the stage environment.

Since there is no JD Edwards code developed for archival and purging, you simply need to use PY to move the data.

Conclusion

If you are concerned about maintaining data integrity in the archival process, know that more data does not necessarily equal better data integrity. In fact, too much data can keep your data integrity tests from running. Once outdated information no longer muddies the water, your data integrity can run and improve its quality.

Make your move to the cloud easier by archiving data. Achieve similar results to Cleveland Golf, as outlined below.

• Migration lasted two years
• Migrated to JDE 9.1 with minimal data
• Resumed archiving in the hosted environment to maintain a smaller set of production data
• Performing annual archiving that takes less than an hour
• Maintain production size
• Improving performance
• Maintain back-up times
• Lower cost of maintenance of old data