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Carve-out with selective data deletion at Oerlikon
Oerlikon Barmag planned to sell a plant in Chemnitz. First, a new SAP company code had to be set up for the buyer, but first the individual histories of certain business transactions had to be deleted.
How can data in a company code be identified and deleted that should not be transferred to the buyer when a part of the company is sold? This was a question that Oerlikon Barmag from Remscheid dealt with some time ago.
The company was about to sell its plant in Chemnitz to the Starlinger Group from Austria. The particular challenge: An SAP company code was to be transferred to the buyer, which was to be adjusted beforehand for all Oerlikon-related data.
The data to be deleted included data relating to the plant's previous activities for the Oerlikon Group - for example, parts lists or old production orders. On the other hand, all previously available finance and controlling data had to be deleted, as STC Spinnzwirn GmbH was a newly founded company.
An asset deal with history sale basically means that the entire data history of the logistics and sales processes is transferred to the new owner. In this case, this would have meant that the experts would have simply extracted a complete SAP organizational unit "plant" from the overall ERP system of Oerlikon. The new company code "plant" would thus have emerged "as a whole" from the overall Oerlikon company code.
Projects in which certain parts within an SAP company code to be transferred must also be eliminated in advance - i.e. at system levels below the extracted SAP organizational unit - are referred to by experts as carve-outs with selective data deletion. These projects are extremely demanding and complex, especially with regard to "maintaining data integrity".
Identify, extract and delete
Identify, extract and delete
In the Oerlikon case, this meant that the work was not done by simply deleting all the data in the seller's company code that related to the sale of the entire SAP organizational unit "plant" and then transferring the new company code created in this way.Rather, the experts at GAMBIT were to migrate the data in such a way that the new owner, for example, only received information on the products which he continues to produce in Chemnitz. The know-how on all other products, however, should remain the intellectual property of Oerlikon.Therefore, the Chemnitz plant was not only easy to extract from the SAP production system of Oerlikon, but it was also necessary to specifically locate and delete those information which concerned the operations of the seller Oerlikon. Certain data was therefore to be transferred, but not others.Due to these requirements, the GAMBIT migration team had to identify, extract and delete important data stocks within the SAP organizational unit "Plant" using highly specialized methods and tools - i.e. selective data deletion.
The experts of GAMBIT use the following methodology for this purpose: First they made a 1:1 copy of the seller's existing SAP system. In the next step, they created new, temporary organizational structures. Then, the team reset all finance and controlling data of the previous SAP system in the copy and deleted all master and transaction data in the entire finance and controlling environment. This should later enable the new owner to create an opening balance sheet containing only those assets (production facilities, etc.) and liabilities that were sold. The company codes not for sale were then deleted in the system copy using the SAP LT scenario "Company Code Deletion". This left only the plant for sale with its company code.
In the next step, the actual finance data that was sold was imported back into this SAP core system (assets, receivables, payables, provisions - everything that is financially written off). The experts then checked the remaining data in two functional and integration tests, thereby ensuring the integrity of the data. Oerlikon then handed over the new, independent ERP system with the adjusted SAP company code to the new owner.
The proprietary Oerlikon system was only changed to include sold transaction data in the accounting and logistics environment; it still contains the data on the sold plant, which is subject to a ten-year retention period. Oerlikon, however, wrote off the sold stocks.
As usual in M&A transactions, the time frame was tight: all conceptual issues had to be discussed in only six weeks and implemented within a four-week implementation phase. Due to the experience gained in many carve-out projects GAMBIT was able to successfully complete the project on the desired date.
Despite the increasing complexity in the course of the project (scope of the data classified as confidential), the separation of the SAP applications went smoothly from the point of view of the seller and the buyer. The new company, STC Spinnzwirn GmbH, can now devote itself to a successful future without IT problems and old debts.
