For interactive reporting and dashboards — yes, SAC covers and exceeds what WebI does, with live connectivity, AI-powered insights, mobile support and self-service capabilities WebI does not have. For pixel-perfect formatted output — Crystal Reports remains superior for highly formatted documents like invoices, packing lists and statutory reports where exact layout control is critical. SAC's formatted export capability is improving but has not reached Crystal's precision. For Excel-based BW analysis — SAC's Data Analyzer replaces much of Analysis for Office, but heavy AfO users who depend on complex Excel formulas and macros may need a transition period. Our migration assessment classifies every report into three categories: migrate to SAC, retain in BO temporarily, or retire — so you know exactly what moves and what stays.

Optimise first — always. Slow BO reports are almost always fixable, and the root causes are predictable: inefficient universe SQL generation, missing aggregate navigation, excessive data retrieval, poor report design (too many queries, too many pages) and under-resourced servers. Fixing these is faster and cheaper than migration, and delivers immediate value to your users. More importantly: if you migrate slow reports to SAC without understanding why they are slow, the same performance problems follow — because the underlying data model and query patterns are the same. Our recommendation is to optimise your BO landscape first, then migrate the stable, performant content to SAC. This way the SAC migration is clean and the business case is about new capability, not about fixing old problems.

In our experience, 30–50% of reports in a typical BO landscape are unused, duplicated or obsolete. They were created for one-time needs, for users who have left, or as copies-of-copies with slight modifications. The first step in any migration is an inventory and usage analysis — examining CMC audit data to determine which reports are actively scheduled, which are accessed by users and which have not been opened in 12+ months. This analysis typically reduces the migration scope by a third before any report re-creation work begins. Of the remaining active reports, we classify by migration suitability: good fit for SAC (interactive reports, dashboards, ad-hoc analysis), partial fit (reports needing redesign), and retain in BO (complex Crystal, Xcelsius with Flash). The result is a realistic migration scope, not a report count multiplied by an average effort — which is how most migration estimates go wrong.

SAC does not use BO universes — it connects directly to data sources via live connections (to BW/4HANA, S/4HANA, HANA, Datasphere) or import connections (to databases, files). The semantic layer in SAC is provided by the data source itself: BW queries provide the semantic model for BW connections; Datasphere analytical datasets provide it for Datasphere connections; HANA calculation views provide it for direct HANA connections. During migration, the business logic embedded in your BO universes (derived tables, complex joins, calculated fields) needs to be re-implemented — either in the data source (BW query, HANA view, Datasphere model) or in SAC's calculated measures. This universe-to-semantic-layer migration is often the most significant technical effort in a BO-to-SAC transition, and our assessment specifically inventories universe complexity to estimate this work accurately.

Yes — this is exactly how most of our BO engagements work. The BO landscape does not stop needing support because a SAC migration is underway. Users still need reports, schedules still run, servers still need patches and new report requests still come in. We run both workstreams simultaneously: a BO support team managing your existing platform under SLA, and a SAC migration team re-creating content and configuring the new platform. The two teams coordinate closely — particularly around report retirement (removing from BO after SAC equivalent is validated) and user transition (training users on SAC versions of reports they currently run in BO). This dual-team model is a core capability of our practice, not an afterthought — it is what our BO clients need because the transition period is typically 12–24 months.