We manage 8,500 commercial lease contracts across 340 properties on SAP S/4HANA 1809 Real Estate Management. Our lease contract tables (VIOBJE, VIOBJA, VIVTB) had grown to 780GB over 12 years, with only 15% representing active contracts. Database growth was impacting backup times (9+ hours) and system performance.
I want to share our successful implementation of automated lease data archiving using SARA (SAP Archive and Retrieval Assistant) that reduced our database footprint by 42% while maintaining full compliance with legal retention requirements. This might help others dealing with similar real estate data growth challenges.
How did you validate compliance after archiving? Our legal team is concerned about audit access to archived contracts. Can you still generate historical lease reports, and what’s the query performance for archived data compared to live database queries?
Compliance validation was critical for us too. We ran parallel reporting for 3 months post-archiving-comparing live vs archived data access. Archive retrieval via transaction AS03 takes 3-5 seconds per contract, which is acceptable for audit scenarios (infrequent access). For bulk historical reporting, we created archive info structures that provide summary data without retrieving full documents. This gives auditors quick access to key metrics (contract terms, rent amounts, dates) while detailed documents are retrieved on-demand.