Room & Board saw unprecedented growth and found themselves staring at a not-so-small problem. They needed to do something to improve the performance of their current SAP system and began looking for options to make that happen. Through their discovery process working with NTT DATA Business Solutions, they found that archiving needed to be an important component of their plan.
Throughout our long-standing relationship with NTT Data Business Solutions, this is probably the most successful engagement we have ever had. Archiving seldom-used data from our system helped improve the performance of our nightly rescheduling job. The job now completes much earlier in the morning, allowing us to get product out the door. System performance is now right back where we need it to be.
Rick Nelson CIO
Room & Board saw unprecedented growth through the pandemic and found themselves staring at one not-so-small problem. They needed to do something to improve the performance of their current SAP system and began looking for options to make that happen. Through their discovery process working with NTT DATA Business Solutions, they found that archiving needed to be an important component of their plan. Room & Board had not archived or deleted any data since they went live with SAP in 2001 and the system was getting bogged down.
For example, they were having trouble with a nightly rescheduling job getting slower over time and that had significant impact on both revenue and operations. At one point, the Room & Board team found that they had over 6,000 open sales orders and quotes that they needed to get to a complete status in order to archive. It took a great deal of time to work through categorizing them, determining why they were open, and addressing the problems. As they dug deeper, they also found that the system was writing data to tables that they didn’t even need. While some things needed to be streamlined, others needed to be deleted entirely.
As Room & Board and NTT DATA Business Solutions continued to work together, both teams looked for ways to solve both the immediate problem as well as develop a new set of best practices that would carry Room & Board into the future.
From the outset of this project, the Room & Board team knew that they would regain space and avoid having to purchase more. They also knew that they would be better positioned for their eventual move to S/4HANA thanks to having cleaned up their data and establishing new best practices moving forward.
At one point during the project, Room & Board’s business analysts were able to identify best practices for archiving data older than seven years and use what they learned moving forward. They completely quit writing to nine structures that were not being used, and found other areas for improvement, too. For example, they found log data that had a short shelf life and needed to be purged every 30 to 60 days. Throughout the process the Room & Board team made it their mission to ensure that the improvements they made to their data management practices would continue to serve them well into the future.
When Room & Board and NTT DATA Business Solutions completed the first two phases of the archiving project, they successfully reduced the database size by 20% to 30% of its original size. In addition, Room & Board was able to slow the growth of their database to a rate far less than what they had anticipated when they initially migrated to HANA.
Once the project was complete, the immediate win for Room & Board was a drastic improvement to their nightly rescheduling job. “If it’s not done by a certain point in the morning, it has a cascading effect on our ability to get product out the door,” explained Rick Nelson, VP of IT for Room & Board. The increased performance also helped them return to normal order processing levels at around 120-125 orders per minute.
Most of Room & Board’s archiving jobs are automated so that the system updates on a daily basis, always archiving anything older than seven years. As a result, the team’s workload for annual maintenance has been significantly reduced.
“Throughout our long-standing relationship with NTT Data Business Solutions, this is probably the most successful engagement we have ever had,” said Rick Nelson, VP of IT.
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Room & Board is a privately held, national retailer of modern home furnishings based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. They serve customers through 19 stores, a robust e-commerce site, Business Interiors channel and Customer Care support.
