SAP ECC

    Retire SAP ECC After S/4HANA or Cloud Migration

    Carry forward what S/4HANA needs. Preserve the rest. Retire ECC before the maintenance deadline.

    SAP ECC migrations move balances, open items and master data. They do not move a decade of document-level history, and the ECC landscape usually stays up to serve it — carrying its own licence, database, hardware and Basis support cost long after S/4HANA is live.

    FI / COMMSDPPAAHR / HCMDocumentsAttachmentsChange documents
    UK Public SectorSyntraETL data migration, archival and legacy application retirement services are available to UK public-sector buyers through the G-Cloud 15 framework.Explore G-Cloud 15 services →

    Where this normally starts

    An S/4HANA conversion or greenfield build takes balances, open items and master data. Line-item history from closed periods, completed purchasing and sales documents, retired assets and archived HR records stay in ECC because the Universal Journal and Business Partner models do not accept them in their original form.

    The ECC landscape then stays up for statutory retention, tax audit, comparatives and the occasional document retrieval — with its database licence, its hardware or cloud footprint, its non-production copies and its Basis support all still being paid for.

    A Legacy Exit extracts ECC document-level history and its attachments into DataVault, reconciles totals back to source, provides searchable access and export through DataLens, and lets the ECC landscape be decommissioned.

    Architecture

    Two flows, run by the same platform. What the new application needs is migrated. Everything else is preserved and made accessible, which is what allows the old environment to be switched off.

    Migration path

    SAP ECCECC 6.0 and earlier releases
    DataMoveExtract, map, transform, validate, load
    S/4HANA or other targetBalances, open items, master data

    Retention path

    SAP ECC historical dataDocument-level history, closed periods, attachments
    DataVaultPreserve with retention, lineage and reconciliation
    DataLensSearch, report and export under role-based access
    SAP ECC retiredLicences, hosting and support withdrawn

    Data in scope

    ECC scope is normally defined by module and by fiscal year, against your statutory retention requirements.

    Financial accounting

    BKPF and BSEG document headers and line items, GL accounts, balances by period and fiscal-year close positions.

    Controlling

    Cost centres, internal orders, profit centres and the cost postings against them.

    Materials management

    Purchase requisitions, purchase orders, goods receipts, invoice receipts and vendor history.

    Sales and distribution

    Sales orders, deliveries, billing documents and customer history.

    Asset accounting

    Asset master records, acquisitions, retirements and depreciation history.

    Inventory

    Material documents, stock movements and valuation history.

    HR and payroll

    Infotype history, organisational assignment, payroll results and year-end records where HR ran in ECC.

    Attachments and documents

    DMS and ArchiveLink content — scanned invoices, contracts and correspondence — linked to source documents.

    Change documents

    CDHDR and CDPOS change history that gives archived documents their audit value.

    What makes SAP ECC different

    The parts of this platform that decide whether a retirement succeeds or stalls.

    Client-aware extractionEvery ECC table is client-scoped. An extract that ignores MANDT silently mixes clients, so extraction is designed client-aware from the start.
    Header and item table pairsECC document history lives in header/item pairs — BKPF/BSEG, EKKO/EKPO, VBAK/VBAP. Archiving one without the other produces a technically complete archive that answers no real question.
    ArchiveLink and DMS contentScanned documents are frequently held outside the database through ArchiveLink or an external content server. These are inventoried explicitly, because they usually represent the actual reason the landscape cannot be switched off.
    Existing SAP archiving objectsSites that already ran SAP data archiving have history sitting in archive files outside the live database. Discovery establishes whether that content is in scope and readable.
    Statutory retention across countriesMulti-country ECC landscapes carry different statutory retention periods by company code. Retention is applied at that level rather than uniformly.

    How completeness is proven

    Nobody signs off a decommissioning on the basis that the archive looks right. Each extract is reconciled back to SAP ECC and the evidence is retained as part of the decommissioning pack.

    Source-to-target reconciliationReconciled
    Source records identified14,829,321
    Records archived14,829,321
    Rejected / exception records0
    Reconciled100%

    Illustrative figures shown to explain how reconciliation evidence is presented. They are not drawn from a specific customer engagement.

    Duration and commercial model

    A single-module ECC archive scoped to a defined fiscal-year range is typically weeks after discovery. Multi-module, multi-company-code landscapes with ArchiveLink content run longer, and discovery sets the duration before implementation is committed.

    Work is delivered as fixed-scope packages priced against the scope established in a Legacy Exit Discovery. Projects typically start from £25K. UK public-sector buyers can call the work off through G-Cloud 15.

    Common questions

    Do we need to finish the S/4HANA migration first?
    No. The retention path runs independently of the migration path, and starting it early usually reduces conversion scope, because data that only needs preserving no longer has to be argued about as migration scope.
    What if we are not going to S/4HANA?
    The same applies. ECC history is archived and made accessible whether the replacement is S/4HANA, Oracle Fusion, Workday, Dynamics or anything else.
    Can we still meet statutory tax audit requirements?
    Records are archived with their document-level detail, change history and attachments, retained for the statutory period applicable to each company code, and exportable on request.
    What about data already in SAP archive files?
    Discovery establishes what exists, whether it is readable and whether it is in scope. Content that must remain retrievable is brought into the same archive rather than left dependent on ECC.
    How is this bought in the public sector?
    Through G-Cloud 15, contracted with Firstcron Services UK Ltd.

    Assess Your SAP ECC Retirement

    A Legacy Exit Assessment establishes which ECC modules and which years are genuinely required, what the landscape costs today, and what a scoped retirement would take ahead of your maintenance deadline.

    UK Public SectorSyntraETL data migration, archival and legacy application retirement services are available to UK public-sector buyers through the G-Cloud 15 framework.Explore G-Cloud 15 services →