Digital Access: Now it's getting serious

Well, in this case, "caring" isn't such a good thing: In its current letter to its customers about surveying, SAP points out that indirect usage is the focus of system surveying: "Surveying includes all Abap-based production and development systems listed in the attached SAP survey plan.

Depending on your licensed SAP products and metrics, additional data may be requested. If there is any indication of a possible indirect use scenario during the review of the submitted survey results, SAP will contact you as appropriate to clarify the issue." Well, contacting customers will then be done by the Global License and Audit Team (GLAC) if even an activity check strikes.

What now?

If indirect use is actually proven as a result of an audit, SAP could demand subsequent licensing at list prices in accordance with the GTC. Even current special discounts under the Digital Access Adoption Model (with up to 90 percent price reductions) would then be difficult to enforce.

Your negotiating position would be more than weak in this situation. Moreover, once you have switched to Digital Access, there is no going back. Once you have decided (or had to decide) on the document-based licensing model, there is no way to go back to other options for licensing SAP usage.

Accordingly, the Digital Access Licensing Model was not developed as a customer-friendly solution for indirect access, but rather to monetize digital transformation. It became increasingly difficult for SAP to justify licensing fees for indirect access.

We know this because we have worked on numerous successful audit defenses for indirect access. It was clear that with emerging smart technologies such as RPA, AI and IoT, SAP usage would increasingly come from connected systems rather than named users. From practical experience on the customer side, we can only confirm that Digital Access suddenly makes existing compliant scenarios costly.

On the other hand, we have also seen cases where digital access was the cheaper alternative for the customer. In our digital access analyses, the results varied significantly from case to case, regardless of the size of the company. It is therefore critical that you perform the analysis correctly to identify the right solution for your business. This avoids nasty surprises. And now is definitely the right time to act.

New reports without announcement

Previously, SAP's counting and estimation included follow-on documents, which are non-compensable repetitions of documents that have already been counted. But on help.sap.com, you can see this limitation: "You do not automatically exclude follow-on documents from the estimate. This must be done manually after the reports have run."

Secretly, quietly, SAP has changed its Estimation Notes and Reports. For S/4 Hana and ECC, there are new versions of the Notes and new reports under new names. The old notes are now classified as obsolete because they have been replaced by new announcements.

At least for Finance, some of the follow-up documents mentioned above have been excluded here, which reduces the number of documents counted in Finance by more than 60 percent on average. In our opinion, there is still more to be done. But you have to take action yourself. Analyze indirect usage and digital access yourself before SAP does.