Most SAP BW cloud migrations don't overrun because of technology. They overrun because organizations try to move a landscape they no longer fully understand, with decades of business logic scattered across thousands of objects and buried in undocumented ABAP code.

This whitepaper makes the case for inverting the sequence. Instead of translating objects one by one and carrying redundancy, technical debt, and inconsistent definitions into the cloud at full cost, a semantic, top-down methodology builds a unified knowledge layer from metadata first. It maps the legacy landscape, extracts business logic into platform-independent terms, and packages the results into governed data products before a single byte is moved.

The result is clarity where there was guesswork: teams know what to migrate, what to consolidate, and what to retire before the migration begins. The target system receives only clean, trusted, business-aligned assets, while inconsistencies surface during modeling rather than after go-live.

Inside, you'll find why bottom-up migrations structurally cannot guarantee trust, how data products become both the outcome and the vehicle of a smarter migration, and how a purpose-built semantic layer operationalizes the approach across five practical stages.

If you're facing a BW/4HANA, Datasphere, or SAP Business Data Cloud migration, this paper reframes it from a risky code-translation exercise into a structured, accelerated, trust-centered design decision.

Move the meaning first. The data will follow.