regiocom is one of the leading service- and business process providers for energy supply companies in Europe. The company is a certified BPO partner for utilities of the SAP AG. Among other things, the field of BPO takes on the whole customer service and the accounting on behalf of the energy supply companies.

Currently, the field of BPO supervises some 600.000 energy customers and therefore applies a SAP IndustrySolution for Utilities (IS-U) system, which is an industry-sector-specific ERP product by SAP for the utility industry.

With this system, in the context of mass data processing, much data is written into tables over the years. This causes high volumes of data which have to be stored over an extended period of time due to economic or legal reasons. Due to the increase of data volumes, the long-term memory becomes increasingly scarce and the performance of the system decreases. In order to counteract a permanentely growing operative data base, data sets can be outsourced to external archiving systems.

This text will be concerned with this central problem and aims at coming up with an archiving solution for document data and their implementation. The aim is to analyze legal and operational aspects of data archiving, the latter being caused by system architecture and system landscape as well as by implied software products.

As an example, the archiving of simulation documents from the balance sheet demarcation in the quality assurance system is meant to be conducted. Therefore, the interface of the SAP system and the archive system initially have to be configurated and furthermore, a storage structure has to be found that allows the comprehensive storage of data from the SAP IS-U system in the archive. The communication between the SAP IS-U and the DOXiS4 archive system preferably should take place online, which means without the exchange of XML and IDoc files as is the case with the offline archiving through the print server.