Case Study: Big Lots reduces data volume and speeds audit reporting with Serrala

Data Archiving to Reduce Volume and Improve Compliance and Audit Reporting

Big Lots, the nation’s largest broadline closeout retailer, turned to Serrala after implementing SAP IS-Retail and seeing retail transaction data grow two to three times faster than expected. This rapid growth pushed data volumes toward 30–40 TB, created performance issues in SAP BW and ECC, and made sales tax audit reporting slow and highly manual, with seven separate steps needed to gather data and meet a two-week auditor deadline.

Serrala implemented a phased data volume management solution using its Corestone offerings to archive data, provide nearline storage, support both BW and ECC on a common infrastructure, and simplify retrieval and reporting. The results included a 97% reduction in archived/nearline data volume, sales query response times of 5–10 seconds, audit response time cut from two weeks to one day, a 200% improvement in sales reporting, and a 90% reduction in data growth rate.

Big Lots