Optimized BW migration through transparency

For companies running SAP Business Warehouse 7.5 (SAP BW) or older versions, time is of the essence. With the end of support in December 2027, migration to modern cloud platforms such as Snowflake, Databricks or SAP Business Data Cloud (SAP BDC) is no longer just an option, but an operational necessity. But many people underestimate this: The actual costs are not incurred by the migration itself, but by what comes afterwards.

Lift-and-shift with pitfalls

The widespread lift-and-shift approach is proving to be an economic trap. Companies transfer their entire SAP BW data landscape unchanged to the cloud - including outdated reports, unused data objects and redundant transformation logic and rules. What appears pragmatic at first glance reveals its pitfalls during ongoing operations:

Cloud platforms charge according to compute resources and storage volume, around the clock. Every unnecessary data query, every superfluous data record generates costs. Unmaintained data is constantly working in the background and drives up the monthly bill. The reason for this is a lack of visibility. Legacy BW systems are historically grown constructs in which business logic, abap code and dependencies have accumulated over the years.

Hardly anyone has an overview of which data is actually being used, which reports are business-critical and which data paths have long since become obsolete. Without this transparency, every migration is like a surgical procedure without prior imaging.

This is where a strategic approach that sees transparency as the foundation of every migration decision comes in. Special tools completely analyze the data in the SAP BW system and make visible what has been hidden for years: unused objects, redundant data flows, hidden dependencies and the actual usage intensity of individual reports. This „X-ray“ of the data architecture enables a well-founded decision to be made about what really needs to be retained and what can be safely left behind.

The advantages of this selective migration are considerable. Companies can reduce their migration expenditure (costs and time) by up to eighty percent through targeted prior analysis. Fewer objects not only mean lower migration costs, but above all lower ongoing cloud expenditure over the entire operating period. The savings accumulate with every day that no unnecessary resources are used.

But transparency alone is not enough. The real challenge lies in transforming the business logic. Decades of Abap code contain valuable process knowledge that must not be lost. AI-supported conversion converts this SAP logic into SQL or Python structures. What used to take months of manual reverse engineering work can now be done in a fraction of the time. The converted logic is then validated to ensure that it corresponds to the original.

The post-migration phase is crucial for long-term success. Without continuous data governance, old problems quickly return: new redundancies arise, data quality erodes, cloud costs rise. The solution lies in a data product approach that transforms the existing business logic into reusable, documented and quality-assured units. These data products not only form the basis for ongoing operations, but also create the prerequisites for advanced analytics and AI applications.

An opportunity instead of a chore

SAP BW migration presents companies with a strategic decision. It can be seen as a tedious compulsory exercise that merely transfers existing inefficiencies to a new platform. Or it can become an opportunity to fundamentally modernize and optimize the data architecture and reduce costs in the long term. The difference lies not in the technology, but in the approach: transparency before the transfer, automation during the migration and sustainable data governance afterwards. If you consistently think through these three phases, you can turn a supposedly costly project into a strategic competitive advantage.