To autonomous SAP license management!

In the past, an SAP survey consisted of counting the license types that had previously been manually assigned to users to the best of one's knowledge. Since 2014, claims have increasingly been derived from measurements, even if the same facts had been known for years in measurements and an SAP inventory customer could be fully convinced that he was compliant.

Controlling costs, transparency about risks, and proactive management of the license inventory lead to autonomous decisions about SAP investments. We distinguish between ten stages on the way to autonomous SAP license management:

Simply count:

The elementary task of license management is to keep the license inventory small. An orderly license management workflow or a regular check of the need for an SAP license reduces cleanup work just before surveying.

Counting the right thing:

The question of whether an expensive professional user or a less expensive, functionally limited user type is assigned to an employee is often based on gut feeling or an interpretation that has nothing to do with the SAP price list or even individual contractual special agreements.

Optimize the license value:

By exploiting the fuzziness of the price list, the proportion of more favorable license types can be increased. For example, if a user uses 98 percent of the functions of a Worker User, it is worth checking whether the last two percent should also be assigned to the Worker User profile within the scope of the blurring.

Transparency over Engine IDs:

It is known that the reported Engine IDs do not provide the values of actual usage. (Examples: Number of locations/products in APO, purchasing documents created externally, active customers, etc.) Claims based on these Engine IDs result in unjustified costs that can be refuted by simple means.

Optimized consolidation:

In practice, the license type hierarchy leads to unnecessary additional costs.
The summed costs of a Worker and Logistic User are significantly lower than the consolidated
Professional User. The aim here is to prevent such consolidations.

Authorization follows optimized license:

Authorization management and license management are growing together. Instead of having to allocate expensive license types through generous authorizations, the aim is to determine the optimal license from actual SAP usage and reduce superfluous authorizations.

Know specifics of the contract:

Compliance requirements are often based on the current price list and do not take into account individual contractual provisions. For example, indirect use and the use of add-ons are highly dependent on the price list on which the contract is based.

Indirect use under control:

To be compliant in the long term, interfaces and add-ons must be assessed for indirect use not just once. Guidelines for developers and the examination of hidden license costs in investment decisions for add-ons lead to stability in compliance.

Contract Simulation:

In the "Optimize the license value" level, the user model has been optimized. This leads to the post-purchase at the most favorable level. By simulating configuration rights, forecasting license requirements for expiring post-purchase conditions, scheduling unused licenses, etc., the post-purchase contract is optimized.

Simulation of the S/4 model:

The supreme discipline of SAP license management is the simulation of a change in the license model, currently for example the change from the ECC license model to the new S/4 Hana user model. Existing SAP customers have to decide on which basis they want to distribute their users in the future.