Case study: Compass Group

At a glance:

• Database reduced by close to 50% following Proceed’s archiving project
• Secure, scalable cloud archive established for long-term data management
• Business now well-positioned for a smoother, faster move to S/4HANA

About The Compass Group

Compass Group Germany GmbH is part of the global Compass Group PLC, a global leader in food and support services. The group operates in more than 45 countries and is recognised for its focus on people, service quality and constant innovation. Across the wider organisation, around 580,000 employees support customers in nearly 30 countries, contributing to revenues of 42 billion dollars in the 2024 financial year. The company’s vision is to provide outstanding contract food and support services, known for excellent service and strong results.

The challenge:

Compass was preparing for a future move to SAP S/4HANA in 2026 and wanted to manage its growing SAP data more effectively. The existing ECC system held a significant amount of data with no archiving in place. This created challenges around system performance, storage costs and long-term data readiness for an S/4HANA programme. Proceed’s archiving assessment identified that approximately 40% of data could be removed from the live system through classical archiving and housekeeping activities.

What Proceed did:

Proceed delivered a full archiving project, using its project accelerators to minimise the timeline. This ensured a structured rollout of data archiving across key areas of the SAP landscape, including archiving of functional data across all areas managed by the SAP ECC application as well as technical data in the SAP system. As part of the programme, a cloud archive solution was established to house all archived content. This gave the organisation a secure, scalable foundation for long-term data management and supported the move towards a best practice model.

Resulting in:

The archiving project reduced the size of the database by close to 50%, with the remaining historical data moved into the archive. This delivered immediate performance and storage benefits and helped prepare the organisation for a smoother and faster transition to SAP S/4HANA. Compass now has a clear, sustainable data management approach in place, allowing the business to move forward with confidence.

For organisations planning a move to SAP S/4HANA:

The Compass Group project illustrates how addressing data ahead of a migration can make the process significantly more straightforward. For organisations at a similar stage of planning, there are several areas worth working through:

• Data volumes: Are your ERP or BW systems carrying data that does not need to make the journey? Archiving before migration means less to carry across and a leaner starting point.
• Legacy systems: Do you have SAP or non-SAP systems sitting alongside your core landscape? Decommissioning these ahead of or during the migration can reduce risk and ongoing costs, while retaining access to the data you need.
• Content and documents: Documents and content tied to legacy platforms connected to ECC need to be part of the plan, whether that means migrating to a modern centralised solution or moving to cloud-based storage.
• Data privacy and compliance: GDPR and data retention obligations do not pause during a transformation. How these will be managed in the new environment needs to be understood early, not resolved at the end.

If you would like to talk through any of these areas and understand what best practice might look like for your organisation, get in touch with the Proceed team.