Customer Success Stories

Daimler Trucks: Getting Business Buy-in for Archiving

The Company
Daimler Trucks, formerly Freightliner, is the largest heavy-duty truck manufacturer in North America and a leading producer of medium-duty trucks and specialized commercial vehicles.

The company sells and services several renowned commercial vehicle brands. Through the company is also a leading provider of heavy-and medium-duty diesel engines and other components. The company's strategic partners in the North American commercial vehicles market include Daimler Truck Financial and TravelCenters of America.

The Problem
When Freightliner originally came to Dolphin several years ago, their database was 1.2 TB and had a fast rate of growth. Performance was slowing, and system maintenance costs were escalating. However, the business required long-term access to detailed information; they were very reluctant to remove any information from the database.

The Dolphin Solution -
Dolphin helped the company with their archiving strategy blueprint and implementation. In the workshop phase, we brought technical, functional and business users together to learn. From the business we learned about access and retention requirements as well as residency periods. We were also able to assist in getting the business buy-in for continuous archiving going forward.

Dolphin’s analysis of the database provided the necessary details for planning an efficient archiving strategy for the long term. The result was to migrate high-volume transactional data records in finance, costs accounting, profit centre accounting, profitability analysis and legal older than 24 months, and the Basis module after 90 days, from the SAP database to IBM CommonStore. This reduced the existing data volume by 50%, and long-term growth was slowed by more than 80%. PBS archive add-ons were implemented to allow users to transparently access both online and archived date with screens identical to standard SAP transaction displays. In addition, PBS index information was used in customer-specific reports for efficient reporting on archived information.

The Results
The solution resolved the immediate performance and system administration issues as well satisfied the business need to fast, transparent access to information.

Dolphin has since implemented data archiving and multiple PBS retrieval modules in a second SAP system with similar results. They are now archiving on on-going basis. Recently they started doing catch up data archiving on a go backward basis to be completed before upgrading to ECC 6.0 per their company policy.

Dolphin also recently added another PBS solution, PBS ContentLink. ContentLink is a lightweight content management alternative to traditional content management system s (CMS). It enables archiving to meet legal requirements and supports Information Lifecycle Management. During that project we also helped Daimler move from writing to EMC disk, which was taking 2 days, to a NetApp worm device that will significantly speed their catch up data archiving process. Estimated completion for catch-up is early 2011.

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