The increasing diversity of products, sales channels, and data presents sporting goods manufacturers with new challenges in document and information management. Together with T‑Systems, an international sporting goods manufacturer modernized its SAP landscape on AWS and established a central document management system for more efficient processes and global collaboration with ImageMaster. This enabled complex databases to be consolidated, workflows to be optimized, and operating costs to be significantly reduced.
The sportswear market is undergoing radical change. More and more people also want to enjoy functional aspects such as comfort in their private and professional lives, turning sportswear into lifestyle clothing. The major sporting goods brands are responding to this new market, and offering an ever wider range of specific clothing for the relevant customers.
Sporting goods manufacturers market their products via various channels: Brand-independent sporting goods retail chains remain the traditional channel, but manufacturers are increasingly using online platforms and their own flagship stores to offer their lifestyle and sports products.
For internal and external processes, they need powerful management systems such as SAP. These manage all logistics processes, e.g. delivery notes and warehousing, along with invoicing, controlling, and customer data. A few years ago, the IT team of a sporting goods manufacturer decided to move its SAP systems to AWS in the public cloud with the help of T‑Systems. With this step, the company wanted to strengthen its own digital and physical sales channels.
In addition, professional document management was now to be established to optimize processes and workflows, because according to an AIIM (Association for Intelligent Information Management) survey, employees spend an average of 45 minutes a day searching for and managing information—around eight percent of a working day.
Especially in the B2C environment, the monthly addition of several million business-critical documents such as invoices, delivery notes, and other tax-relevant papers is not unusual. The amount of data was increasing so rapidly that the existing local Documentum system was not expected to be able to keep up with the demands placed on it.
In order to manage the data volumes and costs, the team therefore needed a powerful, scalable content service platform that would work seamlessly with SAP, and reduce the load on the SAP HANA databases. The platform not only had to achieve significant cost savings, but also fulfill various legal requirements for the duration of the storage, e.g. in accordance with GoBD (German principles for the proper management and retention of books, records, and documents in electronic form and for data access), the German Fiscal Code, the German Commercial Code, and also the EU GDPR for processing and storage of personal data. The sporting goods manufacturer also wanted to use the content service to optimize its internal document processes and workflows.
The sporting goods manufacturer's IT team selected for ImageMaster from T‑Systems, a market-proven content services platform. Customers can choose from a range of deployment models, including on-premises, private cloud or public cloud. In this case, the company initially opted for a T-Systems private cloud solution, which facilitated compliance with EU GDPR requirements, among other advantages. After a few years, the solution was migrated to T Cloud Public enabling the company to achieve further cost efficiencies.
ImageMaster is certified as a content service by SAP for SAP ArchiveLink, ILM, and CMIS (Content Management Interoperability Services). This means that documents can be archived, searched for, and used directly from SAP. By default, the platform contains interfaces to various standard applications such as SharePoint, email systems, Salesforce and file shares. Customer-specific applications can be easily integrated via REST/SOAP web services.
In the initial step, T‑Systems migrated 430 million documents and pieces of data (around 80 TB in total) from the local Documentum installation to ImageMaster within seven months. In 2025, T‑Systems introduced archiving via SAP ILM in addition to SAP ArchiveLink. All data was thus consolidated in a global archive.
The performance of ImageMaster subsequently motivated the team to expand the content service to other use cases—even beyond SAP. The sporting goods manufacturer now uses it for the monthly archiving of financial data from its global stores, backing up bank and financial documents from the online shop's order management system, customer mailings, marketing documents, warehousing, and customs documents, among other things.
The retention periods for the individual documents are stored in the system as central policies. ImageMaster thus supports Information Lifecycle Management with the automatic deletion of data and documents. Using the integrated end-to-end services and workflows, ImageMaster also makes SAP data available for other systems. The content service currently manages over 1 billion documents—a total of 300 TB (mirrored).
Our vision is to establish an enterprise-wide and centralized content service for our client that reduces costs and complexity, and improves compliance, collaboration, and business processes.
Thomas Günther, Product Manager ImageMaster, T-Systems
With the content service, the sporting goods manufacturer was able to reduce its archiving costs for SAP by more than 20 percent. The performance and flexibility of ImageMaster made it possible to implement a central global content service platform—which also serves applications beyond SAP. This drastically reduces costs, complexity, and management work. A wealth of regulatory requirements can be met automatically with the help of ImageMaster. The global sporting goods manufacturer can use ImageMaster in combination with SAP to manage its business-critical documents centrally and in an audit-proof manner, while at the same time accelerating global business processes. Seamless integration into SAP means that documents such as orders, invoices, or delivery documents are available directly in the respective business processes, reducing search work, and shortening processing times. The scalable platform makes it possible to efficiently consolidate large volumes of documents from different regions and reliably fulfill compliance requirements. This improves the company's transparency, efficiency, and decision-making ability along the entire international value chain.
By archiving documents digitally and in an audit-proof manner with ImageMaster, the sporting goods manufacturer significantly reduces paper consumption as well as printing and shipping costs. The central management of business documents in conjunction with SAP enables fully digital processes and minimizes manual document flows. At the same time, IT resources are used more efficiently, as large document volumes are outsourced in a structured manner; and managed over the long term. The solution thus supports the company in making its global business processes not only more efficient, but also more sustainable.
The solution was subsequently migrated to T Cloud Public to achieve additional cost savings in the double-digit percentage range.
ImageMaster from T‑Systems offers a highly scalable, audit-proof content and archive platform with seamless SAP integration that manages documents centrally, and can be operated flexibly as a cloud, hybrid or managed service. The continuous further development and flexibility of ImageMaster ensure that customer-specific requirements are met, and that the solution is future-proof. T‑Systems realizes substantial cost-cutting potential for efficient SAP operations.
