In a true SAP spirit, they also had a very interesting and entertaining keynote session from (SAP Futurist and Innovation Evangelist) Tom Raftery, where he talked about the future of Connected Assets: Optimizing for People, Planet, and Profit.

SAP Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) enables you to manage data volumes and compliance with legal and regulatory mandates at the same time. It also helps you apply retention times and destroy data after the expiration date is reached. Lately the focus with this product has been to archive and delete HR data. However, ILM can also be used for other modules.

To simplify it, ILM improves the function that already exists in SAP for archiving and deletion of data. It supports the whole lifecycle of both existing, and already archived data. It basically puts a layer on top of standard SAP archiving functions/objects, which makes it possible to create more detailed rules.

Because of GDPR it has become free of charge to use this SAP module/function to archive/delete data that can be linked to a specific person, and needs processing because of this.

(Ref: Deployed on premise, this product is sold per managed system, with some capabilities for GDPR and similar data privacy regulations included in the SAP NetWeaver license).