Lift terminated workers and closed processes off the live SF tenant into long-term, queryable cloud archive. Full effective-dated history preserved, multi-TB document attachments included, queryable via Athena/Synapse/BigQuery/Snowflake. Typical ROI: 8–14 months on subscription savings alone.
SF charges PEPM per active worker. SOX, works-council and GDPR retention rules force you to keep terminated-worker history for 7–10+ years. Without archival, you pay full subscription on workers who will never log in again.
SuccessFactors is a leading cloud HXM platform — acquired by SAP in 2011 for $3.4B, multi-tenant, RESTful, two major releases per year. Its commercial model is per-employee-per-month subscription, typically $5–20 PEPM per module, with combined-suite deployments commonly landing at $30–60 PEPM across Employee Central, Performance, Compensation, Recruiting and Learning. For a 30,000-employee tenant that is $10–22M/year before EC Payroll is added.
The retention math is unforgiving. SOX requires 7-year retention of financial records, with HR records that underpin payroll and tax filings caught in scope. EU works-council records under the German Betriebsverfassungsgesetz commonly require 10+ years. UK ICO HR-data guidance suggests 7 years after termination. EU GDPR demands documented retention and right-of-access for data subjects. Net effect: you cannot drop terminated workers from the live tenant, so the PEPM bill keeps compounding.
Syntra ETL's sap successfactors data archival breaks the dependency. Terminated-worker history (with full effective-dated lineage), closed performance forms, completed comp cycles, fulfilled job reqs, finished learning enrollments — all lift off the live SF tenant into cloud-archive Parquet, queryable at single-digit cents per audit query. The live SF tenant shrinks to active workers only, the bill drops accordingly, and every retention obligation is still satisfied with hash-signed evidence.
What makes the Syntra ETL SF archive different from a generic data lake dump.
Every version row preserved with original SF effective-dated start/end and version-id. Archive queries can reproduce worker state on any past date, identical to live SF response.
FOLocation, FOCompany, FODepartment snapshots over time. Reproduce historical org charts for audit and works-council reviews — not just current state.
Multi-TB Employee Files (contracts, ID copies, work permits, certificates) streamed via Document Management APIs, hash-signed, indexed against parent entities.
Pre-built logical views over Parquet — Athena, Synapse Serverless, BigQuery External Tables, Snowflake External Tables, Oracle ADW External Tables. HRBP-friendly semantics.
Every Parquet file hash-signed, every read access logged with timestamp + user + entity + row count. SOC 2 / ISO 27001 / GDPR audit-ready.
Hot tier for recent history, infrequent-access for older, glacier for deep-cold archive. Storage cost typically $0.004–$0.023 per GB-month vs SF PEPM.
A governed, signed workflow that lifts terminated-worker and closed-process history off the live SF tenant without losing a single effective-dated row.
Inventory tenant: active vs terminated workers, closed vs open processes, MDF custom-object retention obligations. Apply retention policy (SOX 7yr, works-council 10yr+, GDPR-driven deletion windows). Output: signed scoping document with row-count estimate.
OData v2/v4 + Compound Employee API extraction of in-scope worker history, talent forms, comp cycles, recruiting reqs, learning records. Foundation Object history pulled in parallel. Documents streamed via Document Management APIs. Three-way row-count validation.
Effective-dated history normalized into date-banded Parquet, partitioned by legal employer / fiscal year / entity. Each Parquet file hash-signed (SHA-256), manifest written, encryption-at-rest applied. Original SF effective-dated keys and version-ids preserved as cross-reference.
Athena / Synapse / BigQuery / Snowflake / ADW External Tables defined. Pre-built logical views deployed (effective-dated worker, headcount-as-of-date, comp-history, learning-completion). HRBPs and auditors granted scoped access.
Terminated workers and closed processes purged from live SF tenant per governed retention policy. Active license count reduced. SF commercial team notified of seat reduction at next renewal.
Monthly delta archive job pulls newly-terminated workers and newly-closed processes. Annual retention sweep enforces deletion at end of legal retention window. Audit log surfaces archive activity for compliance reviews.
Cloud object storage of your choosing, queried by the engine your data team already uses.
S3 Standard / Standard-IA / Glacier tiered storage, queried via Athena serverless SQL. Typical cost $0.023/GB-month + $5 per TB scanned.
Azure Blob Hot/Cool/Archive tiered storage, queried via Synapse Serverless SQL. Compatible with Power BI for HR analytics.
Google Cloud Storage Standard/Nearline/Coldline, queried via BigQuery External Tables. Plays well with Looker for HR dashboards.
Parquet on S3/Azure/GCS, queried via Snowflake External Tables. Lets the analytics team query SF archive alongside warehouse data.
OCI Object Storage Standard/Archive, queried via Oracle ADW External Tables. Natural pairing for customers on Oracle Fusion HCM.
Optional Syntra-hosted read-only portal for ex-employees, works-council reps, and external auditors. Scoped access, full audit trail, no SF login needed.
SAP SuccessFactors data archival is the process of moving historical HR data — closed performance forms, terminated workers' employment history, completed comp cycles, fulfilled job reqs, finished learning enrollments — out of the live SuccessFactors tenant into a long-term, queryable archive that satisfies retention obligations without paying ongoing SF per-employee-per-month subscription fees on workers who are no longer active. Syntra ETL's sap successfactors data archival writes effective-dated history as columnar Parquet on cloud object storage (S3, Azure Blob, GCS, OCI Object Storage), preserves the full SF effective-dated lineage (every version row, every change), and makes the archive queryable via Athena, Synapse Serverless, BigQuery External Tables or Snowflake External Tables — typically at 1–3% of the equivalent SF subscription cost.
SuccessFactors is priced per-employee-per-month, typically $5–20 PEPM per module. Across Employee Central + Performance + Compensation + Recruiting + Learning the combined bill commonly lands at $30–60 PEPM. For terminated workers retained for the 7-year SOX window or 10-year EU works-council window, you are paying full-rate subscription on workers who will never log in again, just to keep their history accessible for audit, payroll re-runs, tax filings or GDPR DSARs. SF data archival lifts that historical population out of the live tenant, preserves full effective-dated history in cloud archive, and lets you reduce the live SF user count (and therefore the bill) accordingly. Customers commonly recover the archive investment inside 12–18 months.
Syntra ETL archives the full SuccessFactors footprint with effective-dated history intact. Employee Central: PerPerson, PerEmployment, EmpJob, EmpCompensation, EmpPayCompRecurring/NonRecurring, Position history, Foundation Object history. Employee Central Payroll: payroll results, pay-component history, garnishments, tax history. Performance & Goals: closed FormHeader/FormReview, completed calibration sessions, goal-library history. Compensation & Variable Pay: closed CompPlan and CompTemplate cycles, PaymentDirectives history, equity grants. Succession & Development: historical talent-pool snapshots, completed dev plans. Recruiting: closed JobReq and Application history, fulfilled offers, candidate profile history. Onboarding: completed new-hire workflows, archived documents. Learning: completed user history, retired curricula, expired certifications. MDF custom objects with reporting-relevant history.
Archived SuccessFactors data lives as columnar Parquet on cloud object storage, partitioned by legal employer, effective fiscal year and entity, with hash-signed manifests. It is queryable via standard cloud-warehouse engines: AWS Athena (serverless SQL over S3), Azure Synapse Serverless (SQL over Azure Blob), Google BigQuery External Tables (SQL over GCS), Snowflake External Tables (SQL over S3/Azure/GCS), Oracle ADW External Tables (SQL over OCI). Syntra ETL ships pre-built logical views that recreate the SF query patterns HRBPs are used to (effective-dated worker lookup, headcount-as-of-date, comp-history-by-employee, learning-completion-by-curriculum), so an HRBP queries the archive with familiar semantics, not raw Parquet. Query cost is typically $0.005 per GB scanned — measured in cents per audit query.
Effective-dated history is the technical heart of SuccessFactors archival. Every change to a worker (job, location, manager, comp) is a separate version row in EmpJob / EmpEmployment / EmpCompensation, and that version row is what regulators expect to see when they ask for headcount-as-of-2019-Q2 or compensation-history-by-employee. Syntra ETL pulls the full version-row set via OData (asOfDate, fromDate, toDate parameters), validates against Compound Employee snapshots, and writes to archive as a date-banded Parquet model: each row preserves its original SF effective-dated start/end keys, plus the SF version-id signature. Archive queries can reproduce the exact state of any worker on any past date, identical to what the live SF tenant would have returned.
Yes. The Employee Files repository in EC Document Generation, plus attachments on performance forms, comp plans, recruiting applications and learning enrollments, are streamed out via the SF Document Management APIs in parallel with the structured-data extraction. Attachments land in cloud object storage with the original SF document-id preserved as cross-reference, hash-signed, and indexed against the parent entity (worker, form, req, etc.) for retrieval. Multi-TB document archives are routine — particularly for global tenants with country-specific contract documents, work permits, training certificates and ID copies. The archive satisfies GDPR-style data-subject-access requests and works-council audit requirements with the original document, not a screenshot.
Cost saving depends on terminated-worker density and module footprint, but the math is consistent. Example: a tenant with 30,000 active workers paying $40 PEPM combined across EC + Performance + Comp + Recruiting + Learning is $14.4M/year. If 40% of the worker history in that tenant is terminated workers retained for SOX/works-council, archiving that history off the live tenant and reducing the active license count by 12,000 saves roughly $5.8M/year. Archive cost for 10 TB of effective-dated history plus documents on S3 standard-infrequent-access tier is roughly $130/month plus query costs measured in single-digit dollars per audit query. ROI is typically 8–14 months. For Employee Central Payroll archival the savings are even higher given EC Payroll's premium pricing.
Yes — that's the point of keeping the archive queryable rather than dumping it to glacier. Re-running historical payroll (for back-pay corrections, retroactive bonus calculations, multi-year tax true-ups) requires access to point-in-time effective-dated worker state — exactly what the archive preserves. Historical HR analytics (multi-year headcount trends, longitudinal comp-ratio analysis, longitudinal turnover-by-cohort) requires the same. Customers commonly point their HR data warehouse (Snowflake / BigQuery / Redshift / ADW) at the archive via External Tables and run analytics that span 10+ years of history at a cost that the live SF tenant could never approach. For payroll re-runs the archive plus a sandbox SF tenant (or a Fusion HCM sandbox) is the standard pattern.
Book a 30-minute discovery call. We'll model your SF subscription cost vs cloud-archive cost across your terminated-worker population and produce a concrete ROI in the call. Most tenants pay back the archive investment inside a year.