Severn Trent Water improves data archiving

Severn Trent will extend its SAP platform to field workforce services

Severn Trent Water has started a data archiving project aimed at better managing the growth of data following a group-wide SAP rollout.

The SAP implementation covered more than 5,000 users across the areas of finance and human resources as well as supply chain, asset, customer relationship and workforce management.

This led to a big increase in the volume of data processed by the firm, which then decided to put a data archiving plan in place to ensure the system performs effectively and reduce costs in areas such as storage.

Software firm Macro 4 provided the archiving system and will support Severn Trent in developing a strategy to handle the levels of information processed by the database underpinning the SAP applications.

The archiving software takes static and less frequently accessed data out of the live system and stores it within a separate, secure archive server.

The system incorporates SAP integration, meaning users can continue to access archived data through the front-end application itself with similar response times.

"We want to follow best practice by having a plan in place right from the start to address how we archive static and historical data away from the live database," said Myron Hrycyk, chief information officer at Severn Trent Water.

"We know that managing the size of the database will help ensure the system performs at optimum levels and keep operational costs down," said Hrycyk.

The SAP rollout was completed in December and is now being followed by a second phase involving the improvement of its asset management processes and field workforce services.