Every year new regulations, more demanding audits and legal requirements emerge that require demonstrating total control of your information and data protection.
However, many companies still have the data spreaded around, some in SAP, others in emails, documents on local machines, even sensitive information without clear auditing of who accesses what and when.
With OpenText Extended ECM, all of this can be managed much more easily, centrally and in a way that ensures regulatory compliance. This solution provides us with total information governance, continuously working in the background to ensure that each document follows its correct life cycle, that policies are applied automatically, and that any regulation is complied with without your teams drowning in manual tasks.
Data Governance That SAP Can't Solve Alone
Let's imagine a financial company with 500 employees using SAP. When they receive an invoice from a supplier, it enters the system. But what about the email of the provider that accompanied it? What about the Excel file with the negotiated conditions? What about the communication of bank account changes?
Each of these pieces ends in different places. The finance department keeps them in a shared folder, the supplier manager has them on their team, someone else in Outlook... When information is needed about such a document, they spend hours searching and asking who has what (and to pray that no critical document has been accidentally deleted).
Besides, who says how long that bill should be kept? Three years by tax law? Five for domestic politics? And what happens when it expires? Is it automatically deleted or is it forever consuming storage and creating privacy risks?
Without a real governance system, companies operate in the dark. They are legally exposed, waste resources on manual searches, and cannot respond with confidence to auditors or regulators.
OpenText Extended ECM: Intelligent and Automatic Governance in SAP
OpenText Extended ECM solves this through a robust records management and information governance model that works within the context of actual work. In other words, compliance happens automatically while they work.
The Core: Retention Policies and Defensible Disposition
Extended ECM allows you to define granular retention policies based on the type of document, department, customer, or applicable regulation.
For example: All vendor invoices are kept 7 fiscal years from closing, then automatically deleted. All customer contracts are kept indefinitely, but the associated personal data is anonymized after 3 years of the relationship ended.
These policies are not guidelines that someone should remember with an alert in Team, with Extended ECM they are configured and executed automatically by the system. When the time comes for disposal, the document is destroyed, leaving an audit record that proves that the deletion occurred as required by law.
Holds: When Legality Stops Disposition
Extended ECM also allows “legal holds” to be applied to specific sets of information in the event of litigation. Once a hold has been applied, no document within its scope is deleted, no matter what retention policies are active. The system automatically locks it.
When the litigation ends and the order is lifted, the hold is removed and the automatic disposition continues its course. All documented and audited.
Full traceability
Every action in Extended ECM is recorded: who created the document, who read it, who modified or deleted it.
OpenText ECM native integration with SAP
Extended ECM integrates directly with SAP so that documents, metadata and governance policies are automatically synchronized. A contract filed in Extended ECM is linked to the partner in SAP. An invoice processed in SAP automatically creates a record in Extended ECM with policies applied depending on the type of document.
There's no need to duplicate information, or to manually move documents between systems, or even leave SAP.
Business use cases with OpenText Extended ECM
Case 1: Surprise Tax Audit
A manufacturing company receives a surprise tax audit. Auditors want to see all vendor invoices for the last 3 years, classified by type of expense, with all approvals documented.
Without Extended ECM: The finance team spends hours searching for documents in shared folders, Outlook, local files, and even paper files. They find invoices, but some approvals are lost. Extension of deadlines is being negotiated. The IT team backs up and restores old databases. The result is more costs, internal stress and the risk of sanctions.
With Extended ECM: the system automatically generates a report that shows each invoice, its approval status, full traceability, all modifications.
Case 2: Retention Management of Financial and Tax Documents
A company must comply with financial document retention regulations for between 5 and 10 years depending on the type of documentation. In addition, some documents must be deleted after a certain time and cannot be saved (such as personal, contact data, etc.).
Without Extended ECM: the financial team tries to remember how long to keep each type of document. Old documents remain indefinitely in shared folders because no one dares to delete them without being sure. When the audit arrives, there is no clear evidence that a retention policy was followed. Storage grows out of control, increasing costs and security risks. On the other hand, documents that should be under legal retention are accidentally deleted.
With Extended ECM: Retention policies are defined only once according to tax and legal regulations in each jurisdiction. The system automatically labels each document with its date of disposition. When the time comes, delete documents, without manual intervention.
Result for the CFO: reduced storage costs, elimination of legal risks, faster audits, automatic documentation of regulatory compliance.
Case 3: Migration to SAP S/4HANA
A company plans to migrate from SAP ECC to S/4HANA and needs to ensure that all previous information is preserved, properly classified, and governance policies are applied to historical data.
Without Extended ECM: manual analysis of dozens of documents, manual classification, risk of loss of history, data cleaning costs.
With Extended ECM: historical documents are automatically integrated, metadata is synchronized, policies are applied according to predefined rules. The migration is clean and audited.
Brait your ally in data governance and automated document management
If your company faces governance challenges, complex regulation, or frequent audits, contact us today. At Brait, we have implemented OpenText Extended ECM in dozens of SAP companies. We know how to set up retention policies that work for your industry and how to integrate it with SAP without disruptions.
