Using gray areas in SAP price lists

What are currently the biggest pain points for SAP customers and how can they be solved?

Janik Schipp: In addition to the "perennial pain point" of indirect usage, companies still struggle to identify the right license types based on customer-specific usage and include them in their license portfolio.

This is due to several factors: On the one hand, SAP offers 17 standard license types in the named-user area. However, these license types do not even begin to cover all customer-specific needs.

On the other hand, SAP argues that the Professional User covers almost all uses in every company. While this is true, it has nothing to do with customer-based license management.

It only simplifies the assignment of the appropriate license per employee in the SAP environment. The solution is to define as many license types as possible.

The majority of SAP customers have fewer than five customer-specific license types, but at least ten per company are recommended. This is always feasible and a one-time effort and reduces the number of expensive Professional Users.

The effort is definitely worth it in terms of licensing and finances.

What steps are required for this?

Schipp: Licensing experts assist with these four steps:

• First, the discussion/definition of desired license types based on workspaces/functions.
• Secondly, the analysis of the current technical usage data per defined area.
• Third, specification and description of the desired custom license types.
• Fourth, the extension of SAP contracts to exchange the new license types for current standard license types.

What other opportunities are often overlooked?

Schipp: For customers who do not want to or cannot make this effort, it is all the more important to use the gray areas that SAP has created to their own advantage. Gray areas are a matter of negotiation!

Let's take the example of standard SAP named-user license types again: Of course, there are limits here, for example, I cannot use an Employee Self-Service license for my Government, Risk and Compliance (GRC) activities.

However, it is quite possible to distinguish more precisely between Employee Self-Service Core, Employee Self-Service, Employee and Manager Self-Service. Gray areas mean cash money if you know your way around and use them to your advantage.

Companies that lack the time resources or the technical know-how are best advised to call on the support of an expert.