Be compliant or not compliant

By now, almost all existing SAP customers should be dealing with the topic of S/4 migration. In addition to the technical migration, it is also worth considering the contractual changes. SAP offers the following options for this:

Product Conversion

SAP is pushing to operate the ERP systems via cloud licenses. Those who do not wish to do so can continue to use the on-prem licenses. In the case of product conversion, the existing ECC contracts remain in place. This means that the existing license metrics for the individual SAP products also continue to apply. This applies to Engines, but also to indirect usage and existing user rights. The metric for indirect usage is user-based and engine-based (e.g. Sales and Service Order Processing). User licensing is usage-based, i.e., a specific user type license is required depending on the transactions executed.

Contract Conversion

As an alternative to product conversion, SAP offers S/4 contract conversion. In this case, the existing ECC contracts are cancelled on a certain date and thus become invalid. In the future, only the S/4 contract with the associated general terms and conditions and the price and conditions list (PKL) will apply. On the new Bill of Material (BOM) there are only S/4 products, with partly new license metrics. If an enginemetric changes, then you have to check before signing the contract if you are still compliant afterwards with your current usage and licensing. The same applies to both indirect usage and user-dependent usage. For indirect use, SAP has described the digital access licenses in the PKL. Sooner or later, these will be measured like an engine. Those who do not want this must regulate the desired deviation in the conversion contract.

Things get interesting when it comes to users. SAP offers the "S/4 Trusted Authorization Review" (Star) service to determine the need for "S/4 Hana Enterprise Management for Professional, Functional and Produc-tivity Use" licenses. As the name suggests, this is based on the existing authorizations and not on the transactions executed.

FUE licenses

It is no different with user licenses in the cloud, here they are called full-use equivalent (FUE) licenses. What is still the star service today could replace self-disclosure tomorrow. Recommendation: before, during and after the S/4 migration, use an SAP-independent tool to optimize SAP cloud solutions and services, as well as users and their authorizations. Otherwise, as in Shakespeare, you may not lose your life, but you will unintentionally lose compliance, and that can be expensive.