Three Migration Options for BW/4HANA and BPC 11.0

Second of a five part series. There are primarily three options in going to BW/4HANA & BPC 11:

·        Conversion of on-premises – Complexity will be determined by which version of both BW & BPC you are currently on.

·        Brownfield implementation – Typically a long-term BW client that has significant content and data in their BW system but existing content is either outdated or no longer used. It makes sense to build a new system leveraging only pertinent content and data.

·        Greenfield implementation – A new implementation leveraging the new BW/4HANA content and bringing only the needed data. This also is the least risky allowing you to keep running your old BW environment in parallel until you are comfortable retiring it.

If you are running on a BPC Microsoft version and looking to move to the BW/4HANA version, it will require a new implementation. However, much can be leveraged from a knowledge and content version of your existing environment.

If you are migrating from a previous version of BW/BPC, some of the foundational changes are on the BW side. If you are running on a BW version earlier than BW 7.5 SP6 on any database (DB) or any version BPC earlier than BPC 10.1 running on HANA, you must move to that version and migrate the DB to begin the move to BW/4HANA and BPC 11. SAP provides accelerators at this point in the form of add-ons and a Starter kit.

Then there are also options on whether to run it on premises, on a cloud or in a hybrid situation. This will be a later topic of discussion. Our next discussion will be on the key changes to BW and BPC and what those advantages are to your organization.