Here, I would like to share some experience upgrading BW NW 701 to 730:-

1. Get the latest SAPup

2. You might get an error during upgrade, where the only solution is to use the latest SAPup...but how if you are already using the latest copy ? The trick is, terminate your installation (at the error itself) (in windows, I used task manager to kill SAPup) and then, copy back / overwrite back the upgrade directory with latest SAPup and other files which comes together (again)...and continue your installation...it will get thru...believe me!!

3. Having your SPAU/SPDD transport ready (released) before Production upgrade!!

4. Immediately open SAP OSS message if you have problem with production upgrade, don't wait and waste your time, raise "Very High" severity, and provide contact no for SAP to call you.

5. If you have additional SPS / SP / Add-on, please include it during the upgrade itself

6. If you upgrade needs OS or DB upgrade, do it earlier than the upgrade itself (SAP recommends at-least 4 weeks before upgrade)

7. if there are SPAM/SAINT upgrade, use SAINT only for Add-ons (even though you can include SP too) and then continue using SPAM for SPs. Make sure you have enabled parallel processing for tp, R3trans, and SPAM and SAINT settings (very useful)..there is a note on how to enable this.

8. Shadow instance cannot the started up (check log, might be wrong environment variable, my case was it was suppose to be pointing to the upgrade directory to start shadow instance, but it was still pointing to original instance path).

I hope my tips and advise can safe hours of your upgrade projects. Please also consider good amount of SAN/storage for your database and file systems backups during upgrade.