Before you pick a platform, find out what is actually in your BW estate
A two-page checklist covering the licence question, the objects nobody has inventoried, and the governance list that decides whether the migration works.
SAP BW 7.5 leaves mainstream maintenance at the end of 2027. This is the work that comes before choosing where to go.
Most organisations do not have an accurate inventory of their own warehouse. Which objects are live. Which reports are genuinely opened. Which transformations still encode a rule somebody can explain.
Without that, nobody can price the work honestly, and the first accurate inventory usually arrives halfway through a migration that was already scoped and signed.
Run the assessment before you take a quote.
The licence check
Most BW customers hold a HANA runtime licence, which restricts external connections to the database layer and closes the extraction route most architects reach for first.
The object inventory
InfoProviders, DSOs, CompositeProviders, BEx queries and how many are actually opened in a month, custom ABAP routines with an owner named against each.
The history trap
BW often holds more history than the ERP underneath it. Extracting from S/4HANA because it is easier can silently lose years.
The representation traps
Packed decimals losing precision, NUMC fields dropping leading zeros, and DSO activation that has been silently deduplicating for years.
The governance list
A named person against every figure the business runs on. Not a team, and not a dashboard. This is the section that decides whether the migration works.
A decision rule
Across BW/4HANA, Business Data Cloud, Datasphere and Databricks, including the cases where the answer is to stay exactly where you are.
Architecture signed off, then the licence blocks it
Puts the licence and interface question in week one, in writing, before anyone draws a diagram.
The numbers disagree in month nine
Forces a named owner and a written definition per figure up front, while it is still a conversation rather than an incident.
Years of history lost in extraction
Asks directly whether BW holds more history than the source ERP, before the extraction route is chosen.
Behaviour nobody documented, that everyone relied on
Surfaces DSO activation, exception aggregation, currency conversion and the rules that live only inside a BEx query.
Most teams cannot complete the inventory section from existing documentation. That is the finding, not a failure.
We have delivered dozens of data platform implementations across Europe, many of them on Databricks, from our base at Sofia Tech Park.
$50M+ saved for clients in 2025
100% client retention rate
106 million data points moved daily
The checklist is there as soon as you submit the form. No sales call attached.
Work sections 1 and 2 first, the BW version and the licence question. They often change the plan on their own.
If the governance section is hard to fill in, that is the finding. Talk to us or don't, but do not skip it.
