Retention Management Cockpit

Retention Management Cockpit
Manage Retention and Disposition of Archived Data and Documents

Increased regulatory requirements have legions of legal and records retention people clamoring for a way to manage the volumes of data and documents inherent in doing business. Companies are being forced to retain business records in a compliant mode safe from alteration or deletion for specified periods of time and thereafter, dispose of them. Records kept longer than the defined retention period may become a legal liability, not to mention incurring spiraling storage costs and being a data management burden. A recent Supreme Court decision (Arthur Andersen LLP v. United States, No. 04-368) involving business record destruction has endorsed the notion that a formal record retention policy which is in accordance with regulations and is strictly followed clears the business from the liability of expired records.

Although SAP Data Archiving and ArchiveLink provide an excellent framework for controlled, unified storage of data, there are no out-of-the-box capabilities for applying corporate record retention policies to this data set. The SAP data archiving framework allows for the definition of a residence period for data archiving objects that controls when a certain data set can be removed from the database and serialized to data archiving files. However, this does not control when and how to dispose of records from the archived files. Problems inherent in an ad hoc retention management process are the lack of process tracking and the non-support of dynamic record selection (for disposition and hold).

Your legal department may have already taken the first important step by formulating an enterprise wide record retention policy. From an IT perspective, you may have taken another important step by implementing standard SAP data archiving and ArchiveLink based storage for incoming/outgoing business documents. This brings business critical process data and documents into a controlled framework where lifecycle management policies can be implemented.

Dolphin developed the Archive Retention Cockpit providing a portal to manage the retention and end-of-life disposition of documents and data in SAP. It is compliance driven, a totally SAP based application, and supports any ArchiveLink certified repository.

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