Unjustly underestimated: Uniform SAP User Management

With few exceptions, this is only one user license per active SAP user. We know from numerous SAP projects that the average is between 1.1 and 1.4 licenses per employee.

The majority of customers used a CUA or IDM to avoid this problem. Both should provide a unique login per SAP user across all existing SAP accounts.

Thus, all SAP accounts of an employee can be assigned to the associated person in the License Administrative Workbench (LAW) through consolidation.

In practice, however, the situation is different, as most customers have historically had different login assignments for their SAP accounts. For example, the last name plus the first one to three letters of the first name are used as the login; a few years later, for example, an IDM is set up that assigns a number-letter combination per SAP user.

However, the "old" accounts with last name and first name are not sufficiently maintained. This leads to the fact that in the consolidation by LAW these employees would get two licenses.

Another cause of poor data quality in accounts is that often the CUA or IDM does not function globally or that more than one user management system is in use.

In other words: Not all SAP systems have the same data structure and quality. In addition, when creating SAP accounts, many fields are not mandatory, such as display name, e-mail, first and last name.

Inevitably, this further deteriorates data quality, which leads to high extra costs in SAP user licenses because more than one SAP user license must be paid per employee.

Example:

A customer with 34 production and 34 development systems in five different countries had about 124,000 SAP accounts and about 38,000 SAP users consolidated by LAW. He has two different IDM systems in use that did not cover all SAP systems.

In Asia & South America separate SAP contracts existed in each case, there the last name plus the first two letters of the first name was used as login.

However, the measurement has to be done centrally and globally by LAW. For this customer, we were able to reduce the total number of SAP user licenses by 13 percent from around 38,000 to approximately 33,000 in a three-month project - only by optimizing SAP user management and without optimizing license allocation.

Well-structured, uniform user management requires a great deal of effort to locate and maintain the often historically low data quality. Many companies fail unnecessarily to locate the associated SAP accounts of each employee in the first place.

Tools such as License Control for SAP Software from Aspera solve this task. With customer-specific rules and corresponding algorithms, the SAP accounts are mapped automatically for each employee.

In this way, 90 to 95 percent of SAP accounts can be correctly assigned - only a small remaining amount has to be maintained manually. In this way, double and triple payments for SAP users are prevented.

Although almost every company has a user management system in place, the financial impact of improving data quality is often underestimated.

In the process, up to 20 percent of the total SAP license volume could be reduced at once through the optimal allocation of SAP accounts. This would only create the basis for a license allocation that still needs to be optimized subsequently. Based on actual usage, further savings potential can be released.