When you run the SAP smart retirement standalone job, you provide the name of a source connection from the list of available connections. Based on the source connection properties, the job identifies the SAP application version as it appears in the Enterprise Data Manager. The job then updates the ILM repository with metadata from the SAP source connection. This metadata includes the type of table and whether or not the table contains data.

If you run the SAP smart retirement job and then generate the retirement entities in the Enterprise Data Manager, the resulting entities are grouped together by a common naming convention. The naming convention identifies the type of tables and whether or not the tables contains data.

When you configure the retirement entities, you can specify a prefix or suffix that will be appended to the entities when the Enterprise Data Manager creates them. The prefix or suffix can help you to identify the entity as a retirement entity. After you generate the retirement entities, the entities appear in the Enterprise Data Manager appended with the specified prefix or suffix. For example, the entity "V2_1CDOC_194" is a change documents entity that has the prefix "V2," which you specified when you created the entities.

The Enterprise Data Manager also groups the entities by the SAP module. The entity name reflects the module name as an abbreviation. For example, the entity "SD_001" is in the Sales and Distribution module, while the entity "FI_04" is in the Finance module. When you configure the entities, you specify the maximum amount of tables in the entity. The Enterprise Data Manager creates the required number of entities and names them according to the module. For example, if you have 1,000 Sales and Distribution tables and you specify a maximum of 200 tables per entity, the Enterprise Data Manager creates five different SD entities.

For tables that do not belong to a standard SAP module, the Enterprise Data Manager uses the following naming conventions when it creates the entities:

You can use this information to decide whether or not you want to retire the entity when you create the retirement project. If you want to reduce the number of tables in the retirement project, you can exclude certain types of tables, such as workflow tables, or tables that do not contain any data, as designated by the "1NODT" in the naming convention.

The Enterprise Data Manager groups special tables in their own entities. Special tables are identified by the suffix "_SAP."

Tables with archived data are identified by the suffix "_SAP_ADK."

The following image shows an example of the entities created by the SAP smart retirement process in the Enterprise Data Manager. These entities were created with the prefix "UF2":