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Guide

SAP BW migration cost — what nobody publishes, and what actually moves the number

As of 2026-08-14

SAP does not publish a price for a BW migration, and any page that gives you one number is guessing. What can be stated honestly is the shape: these programmes are bought in phases, each phase has a different purpose, and the variance between two estates of identical size comes from the share of objects that tooling cannot convert without judgement. Below are the bands our own engagement data carries, with what moves them.

The phase shape, and our observed bands

Discovery is a bounded engagement whose job is to close the path decision; in our engagement data it lands between €50k and €150k. Design follows at €200k to €400k. Execution is where the money is, commonly €500k to €2M. Hypercare runs afterwards as a retainer of €100k to €300k.

The reason to state discovery separately is commercial rather than technical: a discovery phase exists to make a decision safe on an execution phase an order of magnitude larger. Buying execution without it is how programmes discover their complexity tail in the last quarter.

These are Tier-1 figures from our own engagements. They are not SAP pricing, they are not quotes, and they do not transfer to a mid-market estate or to a different country's rate base without adjustment.

What tooling did to the number

The largest single movement in this market's pricing came from conversion tooling rather than from rates. Manual object-by-object conversion of a Tier-1 estate is six to twelve months of hand modelling; guided generation compresses the mechanical share into six to twelve weeks plus targeted remediation.

On a Tier-1 programme, our engagement data shows the timeline moving from twelve to eighteen months down to six to nine, and fees from €1-1.8M to €500-900k.

That is a halving, and it is the reason customers chose to move in this window rather than defer — an argument that survives the maintenance extension of SAP BW 7.5 to 31 December 2030, because it was never a deadline argument.

The complexity tail is the budget

Every BW object scanned by the generator carries a complexity score from one to five. Ones and twos generate automatically with under five per cent manual touch-up. A three generates with twenty to forty per cent manual remediation expected. Fours and fives are flagged for manual redesign.

On a typical Tier-1 estate, seventy to eighty per cent of objects land in the auto-eligible band and twenty to thirty per cent do not — and that minority is what you are actually buying. Two estates with the same object count and different tails produce budgets that no negotiation reconciles.

This is why a proposal quoting a price per object should be read as a proposal that has not scored the estate.

The four items most often left out

Reporting-parity testing. Auditor-grade reconciliation that every legacy report reproduces with documented variance, budgeted in our data at four to eight hours per InfoCube. It is not optional and it is not a contingency line.

Custom ABAP. Generator output for custom transformation routines is a stub, and stubs are rewritten as data flows or SQL views. Custom ABAP migration work runs several times the complexity of the equivalent standard object.

Historical data. Archive in place, port selectively, or leave cold — decided late, this damages timeline and budget in the final quarter, reliably.

Dual running. Where a bridge or a parallel landscape is used, the customer pays the target platform's consumption and the legacy footprint simultaneously for the whole overlap. A bridge without a documented sunset date is the difference between a two-year overlap and a seven-year one.

What we cannot assert

SAP publishes no migration price, and we do not publish a calculator. Every band on this page is an observation from our own Tier-1 engagements, not a quote and not a market average — mid-market estates, different rate bases and different countries move them materially. We also do not publish licence or subscription costs for the target platform: those are contractual and customer-specific.

Frequently asked

How much does an SAP BW migration cost?

There is no published price. In our engagement data, Tier-1 programmes buy discovery at €50-150k, design at €200-400k and execution at €500k-2M, with hypercare as a €100-300k retainer. Your number is set mostly by the share of objects needing manual redesign.

Does SAP publish migration pricing?

No. Migration is delivered by partners and priced per estate, so any figure you find is either a partner's observation or an estimate someone made. Ours are observations, and we label them as such.

What is the single biggest cost driver?

The complexity tail — the twenty to thirty per cent of objects that tooling flags for manual redesign on a typical Tier-1 estate. Object count on its own predicts very little.

Did the maintenance extension reduce the cost?

No. It removed the deadline pressure on classic BW 7.5 work, which changes negotiating position more than it changes effort. The tooling economics that halved Tier-1 fees are unaffected by a maintenance date.

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