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You've successfully run your archiving test cycle. Users can find their historical data, and the database has shrunk significantly. The project is ready for go-live, right? Not yet. There is a critical, often-forgotten step that can cause major production failures if ignored: interface testing.

Many external systems, data warehouses, and custom reports are built to read directly from the SAP database tables you are about to clean out. As highlighted in the "Archiving SAP Data Practical Guide," failing to test these dependencies can lead to broken processes across your entire IT landscape. This checklist covers the key interfaces you must validate.

Your Interface Testing Checklist

1. External & Third-Party Systems

Identify every external application that communicates with your SAP system. These are the highest-risk areas.

• Warehouse Management Systems (WMS): Does your external WMS read from delivery tables like LIKP or LIPS? After archiving, will it still be able to process shipping and goods movement updates correctly?
• Tax Engines & Compliance Tools: Do your tax calculation systems perform lookups on historical invoice data from VBRK?
• Customer/Vendor Portals: Can customers still view their order history if old sales orders from VBAK have been archived?

Test Case: For each identified interface, run a full end-to-end process in your QA environment after the data has been archived to ensure no data calls fail.

2. SAP Business Warehouse (BW) / Data Warehouse

Your analytics platform is deeply dependent on the data in your ERP system. Archiving can break the data extraction process.

• Data Extractors: Many standard and custom extractors read directly from core tables like BKPF, MSEG, or VBAK. If an extractor job runs looking for data from an archived period, it may fail or pull incomplete information.

Test Case: After archiving data in your test system, execute your key BW data loads (both delta and full). Verify that the jobs complete successfully and that the data in your BW reports reconciles with the source system.

3. Custom Reports, Programs, and Queries (`Z-Reports`)

Over the years, your developers have likely created hundreds of custom reports. Many of these will not be "archive-aware" by default.

• Custom ABAP Reports: Any custom report that performs a SELECT statement on a table you are archiving (e.g., SELECT * FROM BSEG...) is a point of failure.
• SAP Queries (SQ01): User-created queries that reference archived tables will also fail to return complete data.

Test Case: Create an inventory of all custom programs that touch the target tables. Each one must be executed with selection criteria that spans the archived data range to identify which ones need to be modified to read from the archive.

4. Mobile Devices & RF Scanners

Don't forget the devices used on the warehouse floor or by your field teams.

• Warehouse Scanners: A handheld RF scanner used for picking or putaway might perform a real-time lookup against a delivery or transfer order table. If that data is archived, the scanner's function could fail.

Test Case: Perform standard warehouse operations (picking, goods receipt) using the RF devices in your test environment to ensure their lookups still function correctly.