SAP technical managed services, roadmap advisory, legacy system archiving
A client where the stakes explain the standards
Stichting Sanquin Bloedvoorziening is the not-for-profit foundation responsible for the blood supply of the Netherlands. Behind that responsibility sits an SAP estate with an unusual profile: alongside finance and HR ran the batch traceability and pharmaceutical track-and-trace systems that follow blood products through their lifecycle, the systems that make targeted recalls possible. When ETZ Global began providing SAP technical services to Sanquin in January 2016, this was the landscape it took responsibility for.
Sanquin was among ETZ Global’s first clients, and the relationship shaped the company’s standards: it is where the discipline of monthly technical reporting, roadmap advisory and conservative, rehearsed change was forged, the same discipline ETZ later applied for hospitals, manufacturers and consultancies on three continents.
The full-landscape years
Through the first phase of the relationship, ETZ provided technical support across the breadth of the estate: the financial system, the HR system, the approval portals used across the organisation, the batch traceability platform, the pharmaceutical serialisation and track-and-trace environment with its interface framework, access governance, and the central monitoring platform, which ETZ implemented and configured.
Beyond keeping systems running, ETZ served as Sanquin’s technical navigator. A standing roadmap, refreshed on a cycle, mapped each SAP product against vendor support horizons and the platform shifts coming toward 2027, so that every investment decision could be made with the end state in view. Along the way ETZ built and operated cloud environments in the EU for Sanquin’s needs, on more than one platform, and modernised the authentication in front of the portal estate.
A partner that scales in both directions
Over time, Sanquin’s IT strategy evolved, as strategies should. Core SAP workloads consolidated onto large managed cloud platforms, and pieces of the estate ETZ had cared for moved to new homes. This is the moment that tests a technical partner: the incentive is to cling, the right thing is to hand over cleanly and stay useful.
ETZ chose the second path. Transitions were supported rather than resisted, knowledge was transferred rather than guarded, and the relationship continued through every change of shape. There is no contractual mechanism that produces that behaviour; it is simply how a partner acts when it intends to still be trusted in year ten.
The last system standing, and why it matters
Which brings the story to its current chapter, and to a problem nearly every established SAP customer owns: the system you no longer use but may not delete.
When Sanquin decided to stop using SAP for HR production, Dutch law did not stop applying. Salary and HR records must be retained for prescribed periods in their original electronic format. Keeping a full production environment alive for that purpose is expensive; extracting the data into another format invites questions about integrity and usability that no one wants to answer years later in front of an auditor.
ETZ’s answer was a purpose-built archive: a read-only copy of the HR system, hosted in an EU cloud environment that ETZ operates, available to authorised Sanquin users through the familiar SAP interface during business hours. Privacy law is honoured through controlled, selective deletion of records as retention periods lapse, under Sanquin’s guidance and with a complete audit trail of every technical action. Daily health checks and backups keep the system provably intact, at a small fraction of the cost of the production landscape it replaced.
The arrangement has been renewed every year since 2022. It is not glamorous work. It is the work you are given when, after a decade, an organisation that safeguards the national blood supply decides you are the right hands for the data it is legally bound to protect longest.
Worth carrying forward
- Long relationships are built by scaling in both directions: growing where you add value and handing over cleanly where you do not.
- Roadmap advisory is a service in itself. Mapping every product against vendor support horizons lets a client make investment decisions with the end state in view.
- Decommissioning is not deletion. Legal retention duties outlive production systems, and a read-only archive in original format answers auditors better than any extract.
- Privacy compliance and retention compliance pull in opposite directions; controlled selective deletion with an audit trail satisfies both.
- The truest reference is not the size of the current contract but the sensitivity of what a client still trusts you to hold.