One of India’s largest broadcasters solves data growth challenges with OpenText Solutions for SAP
Sun TV leverages OpenText and Avaali to control data growth and reduce report processing time
“With the OpenText solutions we put in place, we saw a reduction in our storage and system administration costs, along with process improvements for our transactional processes.”
Sun TV, one of India’s largest media conglomerates, operates 33 television channels with a reach of more than 95 million households in India. Sun TV Network’s channels are available in 27 countries, including the United States, Canada, Singapore, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and across Europe.
Sun TV is also in the business of FM Radio broadcasting and the company’s film production and distribution division, Sun Pictures, produces and distributes movies in the Tamil language. The company also has the license to operate an Indian Premier League franchise called “Sun Risers Hyderabad.”
Addressing the challenges of rapid SAP data growth
Sun TV has seen immense business growth recently, and subsequently, their SAP ECC 6.0 database grew to an unmanageable size. Sun TV explored options for archiving solutions from SAP® and OpenText for their ECC system with the goals to keep the production database lean, increasing performance, and improve business efficiency. The company had too many open transaction documents in SAP from past years and needed a solution to identify open documents and close them. There were also gaps in their current processes that resulted in continued accumulation of open transactions in SAP—transactions that were not closed even though the corresponding business process was completed.
Sun TV was also looking to reduce maintenance windows and system administration costs, implement compliant, long-term data storage mechanisms and meet industry standards from a statutory and regulatory perspective.
To address their goals, Sun TV selected OpenText™ Archiving for SAP® Solutions and OpenText™ Document Access for SAP® Solutions. “We looked at various solutions and selected OpenText Archiving and Document Access for SAP Solutions due to their deep integration with SAP. We believe that this solution will best address our problem of decreasing performance of SAP applications, growing administrative effort, growing resource consumption, and overall rising TCO,” said Ananth Nagarajan, CIO, Sun TV
Partnering with Avaali
For their implementation of Archiving and Document Access, Sun TV chose OpenText implementation partner, Avaali. “We did an evaluation of various implementation partners and chose Avaali as our implementation partner due to its rich skill sets and implementation experience of successfully executing multiple projects for OpenText solutions for SAP,” said, Nagarajan.
The implementation team from Avaali performed a detailed analysis of the SAP ECC database, identified key drivers for database growth and current database size, coordinated with infrastructure and storage teams, and conducted workshops with key business and functional users to finalize the archiving policy. The Avaali team created a detailed blueprint document before starting the implementation.
Business Benefits
Sun TV now has the ability to run a detailed SAP database analysis, which identifies appropriate data management approaches. The Document Access and Archiving solution enable the archiving, management, and retrieval of all business documents from within the SAP infrastructure. Documents are stored in a secure, unalterable form in the OpenText™ Archive Server and the solution integrates seamlessly into leading SAP applications, allowing SAP users to access all documents regardless of their location. All employees have instant access to the same information, enabling efficient, global business processes along with a consistent flow of information, which integrates not only customer data but also data from suppliers and other business partners. Sun TV can now identify and list all transaction documents in SAP that are open, identify the reasons why transactions are left open and develop procedures to close them.
The Data Archiving solution allows them to archive all older data into an external archive server and delete corresponding records from the SAP database. This has yielded a reduction in database size and improved performance.
“With the OpenText solutions we put in place, we saw a reduction in our storage and system administration costs, along with process improvements for our transactional processes,” said Nagarajan. “We gained database space by archiving three years of data while retaining online access to archived data via SAP screens. In addition, we now have no open transactions in SAP. With this solution in place, we feel we are better prepared to manage our continued business growth going forward.”
About Avaali Solutions
Avaali Solutions www.avaali.com is a specialist in enabling organizations to leverage digital technologies to manage their internal business processes as well as engage better with their ecosystem (customers, partners, vendors, etc.). Avaali’s advisory, consulting, and implementation services in Enterprise Information Management and Enterprise Mobility has enabled enterprises to transform their business processes and engage better with their stakeholders including customers, employees, partners, vendors and shareholders.