The quantity of data in the JD Edwards system was growing and performance was starting to decline.
Karen Riner, Systems Administrator at Tyndale originally saw Purge-it! at JD Edwards INFOCUS.
“I was particularly impressed by how the JDE archiving tool was developed and built as part of the JDE ERP system.”
Pacific Steel & Recycling
Pacific Steel & Recycling has been running JD Edwards since 1996. During that time, the
company has accumulated millions of rows of data that, apart from a small number of sales records, had never been purged.
Originally from Germany, the Thiebes family founded Pacific Hide & Fur Depot in the 1920’s in Great Falls, Montana, USA. Today the company offers new steel sales, a wide variety of processing services for their customers to prepare their steel and agricultural steel products. Pacific deals in Scrap, Commercial & Consumer and Electronics Recycling. The company is 100% employee owned with over 700 employees.
Key Requirements & Challenges
To complete the JD Edwards upgrade from EnterpriseOne 9.1 to 9.2 in a single weekend.
In a hosted environment the company felt they were paying for premium storage and replication of data that they were neither using nor planning to use in the future.
Pacific was experiencing problems maintaining some indexes and with storage growth because of the gross amount of data in some key tables.
In preparation for the JD Edwards system upgrade, in addition to changing hosting partners, the company were keen to minimize the amount of data movement from one partner to another.
All these factors combined, set the stage for Purge-it! to help Pacific Steel & Recycling manage their data growth and purge their end of life data.
Product Selection
The decision to choose Purge-it! was influenced by a reference from a partner combined with the sales literature online at JDEMart.com. The final decision was made following a product demonstration by Klik IT.
“After the demonstration, it was a given that this was the product for us. It allowed us to keep the archiving and purging analysis out of the technical realm and enabled us to manage our data with business analysts. Overall, it just looked like it was going to be easy to manage.”
The Purge & Archive Project
Pacific Steel & Recycling purged and archived 17 years of data from the production system and purged the archive.
Due to the huge volume of data being handled, the company ran the process one fiscal year at a time. It took approximately two months to complete the initial purge.
Pacific needed to purge GL, AP, AR, Sales, Purchasing and Works Orders. That along with the Custom Module allowed them to purge some of the EDI tables and custom tables.
Purge-it! highlighted data integrity issues with data from 1996. However, the Purge-it! Custom Module allowed Pacific to bypass some of the integrity rules allowing the purge and archive activity to progress. This meant that the flagged data could be worked through separately without delaying the overall project.
“The transition to Purge-it! went remarkably well. Within a few short hours of training, we felt like we were competent enough to start archiving and purging. A few months later, we had purged 32 million records and we’re still going.”
Kenneth Hess, CIO, Pacific Steel & Recycling, explained “internal users did not notice a difference following the purge and archive activity which speak volumes about Purge-it!” He added, “most implementations normally come with some level of pain for users – this one didn’t.”
Story Snapshot...
Percentage of JDE data archived with Purge-it!
- 72% of Messaging data
- 51% of Inventory data
- 46% of data archived using the Custom Module
- 42% of Purchasing data
- 39% of data archived from the Master Table (using the Custom Module)
- 29% of Accounts Payable data
Percentage of JDE data purged with Purge-it!
- 95% of EDI data
- 94% Manual backups
Why Purge-it!?
“We have been very pleased with Purge-it! We have had a competitor product for many years and were only able to get sales data archived and purged. Within just a few short months, we have made it through most of the modules and have purged over 32 million records."
"We are impressed with the ease of use and minimal effort required to run the program. Implementation and support after the install have been very responsive to our needs as well.”
