“Thanks to this project, we were able to expand, improve, streamline, and stabilize the provided services – OpenText Archiving Services for SAP, which allows us to provide our service to a larger number of customers, faster delivery of services and their broader scope. It also opens the opportunities to focus on new archiving topics.”
The IT Department of ŠKODA AUTO a.s. company has an increasing share of responsibility for new tasks in the area of SAP applications on the group-wide scale. The SAP Group Competence Center (SAP GCC) develops digital tools and solutions focusing among others on HR, finance, and logistic processes for a wide range of specialist departments across the VW Group.
ŠKODA AUTO a.s. consistently supports the development of digitalization and automation of processes – both in car production and in all other areas of business.
ŠKODA AUTO SAP Group Competence Center (SAP GCC) has become the main supplier of SAP archiving services throughout the VW Group.
Description of the Situation
The SAP GCC Department consists of a total of 13 teams, of which one team is responsible for SAP archiving services for SAP systems at ŠKODA AUTO as well as for SAP systems within the VW Group. The SAP archiving team within the SAP GCC Department was established during 2020 in order to separate the topic of operation and development of archiving services based on the OpenText technology from the team responsible for SAP system operation (until then, the operation of SAP and OpenText systems was managed within one operational team). This has provided more space for full focus on the SAP archiving services, as well as for the implementation of larger projects, supporting more customers, and expanding the portfolio of the offered services.
Solution
IXTENT, being a long-term partner of ŠKODA AUTO a.s., began working with the newly created archiving team on improvement of services, assurance of greater transparency, and stabilization of individual solutions based on OpenText technologies.
The SAP GCC archiving team together with IXTENT have gradually developed additional archiving environments, which are primarily intended for other members of the VW Group, thus gradually fulfilling their mission to offer unified services for “everyone” from one place.
IXTENT helps ŠKODA to operate 4 productive archiving environments in 24/7 mode. A considerably closer cooperation has been established over the past year, making the cooperation between ŠKODA AUTO a.s. and IXTENT s.r.o. much more friendly and open.
IXTENT provides consulting services and support for OpenText applications within the framework of the long-term cooperation, with support of the OpenText Archive Center product being the most important.
Regular service at ŠKODA AUTO includes for example:
- Regular system inspections and maintenance, which are carried out every working day.
- Operation stabilization, which is a continuous activity aimed at elimination of outages. And improving the quality of operating documentation.
- Implementation of new configurations and changes based on new requirements. For example, setting up new logical archives, or increasing the security of the provided services.
- Regular updates of the operated systems.
- Change and incident management.
Conclusion
Individual smaller or larger projects to create a new environment or to improve (upgrade) the existing archiving functionality were executed within the framework of the cooperation. Some projects are still running and new ones are coming up. The projects also address data migration across different environments so that all environments are gradually unified into one central point and fulfil the vision of given department.
Results of some projects:
- Upgrade of archive servers to version 20.2.
- Launch of support for SAP ILM archiving.
- Migration of all previously archived data to the new storage system.
- Installation of two new productive archive environments.
Among other things, the improvements have identified a large number of potential risks that could have caused failure of the supplied service.
The systems are running to the satisfaction of all SAP GCC customers (VW Group).
Another extended operational contract was concluded after the completion of the “operational” project, In addition to this operational contract, IXTENT s.r.o. has also concluded other contracts with ŠKODA AUTO a.s. to support larger projects and provide consulting services in terms of SAP archiving customization.
This year’s plans under the operating contract include for example an upgrade of all archiving environments to the latest version, including the replacement of the servers on which these environments run.