Accelerating SAP BW Transformation to Cloud with Enhanced Agility and Reduced Costs
The Customer’s Journey to a Future-Ready SAP BW Landscape with Incture
Our customer is a global manufacturer of organic chemicals, delivering specialty products across industries such as aerospace, automotive, construction, and electronics. With a strong reliance on data-driven insights, their SAP Business Warehouse (BW) environment played a critical role in enterprise reporting and decision-making.
However, their existing on-premise SAP BW 7.5 SP24 landscape was nearing a strategic inflection point. Increasing infrastructure overheads, evolving SAP cloud roadmap requirements, and the need for improved scalability prompted the customer to modernize their BW environment. They partnered with Incture to seamlessly transition to SAP BW Private Cloud Edition (PCE) on Business Data Cloud (BDC), ensuring continuity, performance, and future readiness.
%
Reduction in Infrastructure Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
%
Faster environment provisioning and scalability
%
Reduction in operational maintenance costs
Challenge:
Navigating Complex SAP BW Migration While Ensuring Business Continuity
The customer faced multiple challenges in preparing their SAP BW landscape for cloud transformation. Their existing system required a mandatory Support Pack upgrade to align with SAP’s cloud compatibility standards. At the same time, the BW environment was deeply embedded in business operations, making downtime and disruption a significant risk.
The migration also involved complexities related to the SAP HANA database transition and maintaining system consistency during version upgrades. Potential transport freezes during version mismatches further added to operational risks. Additionally, ongoing infrastructure maintenance costs and the need to align with SAP’s evolving cloud strategy created urgency for a streamlined and future-ready solution.
A key challenge was gaining deep visibility into the existing BW landscape, including dependencies, critical workloads, and system complexity. Without this clarity, migration planning risked inefficiencies, delays, and unforeseen disruptions.
Solution:
Data-Driven Migration with Data Switch and Seamless Transition to SAP BW Private Cloud Edition
Incture implemented a comprehensive and structured migration strategy, combining its proprietary accelerator Data Switch with deep SAP expertise to ensure a smooth transition.
A successful migration began with establishing complete visibility into the customer’s BW landscape. Incture leveraged Data Switch, an internal accelerator designed to perform a comprehensive, automated assessment of SAP BW environments.
Data Switch analyzed the BW system and generated detailed insights across key components, including transformations, queries and reporting artifacts, data flows and dependencies, InfoProviders and modeling objects, and critical BW workloads. This provided a holistic view of the BW footprint, enabling a clear understanding of system complexity and object distribution.
These insights formed a strong technical baseline for migration planning. With Data Switch, the team was able to accurately estimate migration effort, identify critical workloads early, map dependencies across BW objects, and design a structured lift-and-shift strategy with reduced risk.
Following the assessment, Incture upgraded SAP BW from SP24 to SP31 to ensure compatibility with the target cloud environment. A full system backup and restore of both SAP BW and SAP HANA databases was executed to safeguard business continuity.
The team then performed a technical lift-and-shift migration to SAP BW Private Cloud Edition on BDC. Post-migration, connectivity, access controls, and environment configurations were established in alignment with enterprise requirements. Critical BW workloads were rigorously validated to ensure performance, accuracy, and reliability.
Controlled upgrade windows were carefully managed to minimize disruption, ensuring business continuity throughout the transformation journey.
Results:
Enabling Scalable, Cost-Efficient, and Future-Ready BW Operations
The successful migration enabled the customer to modernize their SAP BW landscape with confidence and precision.
By leveraging Data Switch, the customer gained complete visibility into their BW environment before migration, significantly reducing risk and improving planning accuracy. This data-driven approach ensured a smooth execution with no surprises during the transition.
The move to SAP BW Private Cloud Edition on BDC resulted in substantial cost savings through reduced infrastructure and operational overhead. Faster environment provisioning enhanced agility, enabling teams to scale and adapt quickly to evolving business demands.
With a modern, cloud-aligned architecture in place, the customer is now better positioned to leverage advanced analytics capabilities and align with SAP’s long-term innovation roadmap.
Incture’s combination of accelerators and expertise ensured a seamless, efficient, and future-ready transformation, empowering the customer with a resilient and scalable data platform.