A resilient SAP role structure is like the foundation of a building: when the core elements are clearly defined and deliberately assembled, adapting to new demands becomes far more manageable. But when those elements are inconsistent or shaped by outdated assumptions, even small changes can create friction and exposure to unnecessary risk.
Many organizations rely on traditional approaches to SAP roles by structuring access around job titles and technical permissions. While this may have worked in the past, it can make roles harder to maintain and adapt as your business evolves.
When organizations rethink role design and adopt a modular approach aligned to business processes, they can build stronger and more flexible structures. In this blog, we’ll explore how this approach works in practice and uncover why splitting SAP roles into well-defined blocks ensures stronger security and greater flexibility that adapts as your business grows and changes.
Why has the job title-based approach to role design become unsuitable, despite serving many businesses well for so long? There are three main reasons:
Organizations often assign general titles aligned to the job title of those utilizing them, like “Warehouse Manager” or “Finance Manager”, without considering the specific tasks each person performs. For example, different warehouse managers at the same organization can have varying responsibilities, with some managing people and others overseeing inventory. Yet their access privileges can be identical.
This practice creates under- and/or over-provisioning challenges; introduces unnecessary risk and conflicts of interest; makes Segregation of Duties (SoD) harder to enforce; and inflates SAP licensing costs by giving users access they never realistically need.
Copy-and-paste roles have eroded control
Organizations tend to tweak and duplicate existing roles over time, especially when they need to provide new access in a hurry. After a role undergoes three or four tweaks, the original role intent is often lost completely. This can lead to a situation whereby people performing similar functions have entirely different levels of access that do not match the required standard. These inconsistencies create obvious knock-on risks around compliance, auditing, security oversight, and productivity.
The overall business risk of a job title-based approach is considerable and wide-reaching, including:
Operational/fraud risk: Users with unnecessary access may create a fake sales order and redirect funds to an account they personally control.
Reputational risk: Unqualified users could release poor-quality products for shipment, which may be unsafe or harmful to the public (especially in food and pharmaceuticals).
Licensing cost risk: Too many employees with financial transaction access will prompt SAP to license all those users at the highest level, which can make overall licensing costs very high.
The best way to avoid these risks is to build roles ‘from the process up’, using business activities as a base rather than job titles or technical codes.
A good way to think about this is to imagine that you’re building a LEGO figure, where each brick represents a single, controlled business task (for example, “Create Purchase Order” or “Approve Payment”). To create the right role for a user’s needs, you build a combination of bricks into a full figure.
But what happens if business needs or role responsibilities change, due to outsourcing, mergers, system upgrades, or any other circumstance? No problem: you simply move or replace the relevant bricks as required.
The guiding principle behind this is to break access down into smaller, self-sufficient units that are stacked in a way that supports your business, regardless of how it changes in the future. By building roles in this way, you gain:
Business alignment and flexibility
More adaptability, agility, and scalability make it easier to support business goals and strategies in SAP as they evolve. For example, if a warehouse function is outsourced to a logistics provider, the team can transfer the relevant access while keeping the remaining duties in-house, without having to reengineer a whole new role.
Stronger security and reduced risk
By limiting access to what’s strictly necessary and no more, employees have less scope to make mistakes or conduct malicious action. It can also help improve their productivity by removing distractions. The ability to review each block (business action) independently also aids risk management by ensuring that no one person can complete an entire risky process on their own.
Reduced cost and operational complexity
When roles are made into smaller, standardized components, audits are simpler, unnecessary licensing costs are reduced, and duplication is eliminated. This approach also makes it easier to respond to business changes without costly redesigns.
A modular, business-aligned approach can bring much-needed clarity to SAP roles and help you manage access with greater confidence. To help bring this approach to life, Turnkey has developed a collaborative workshop that uses LEGO bricks as a metaphor to represent business tasks.
The workshop helps reframe SAP security as a strategic business enabler rather than a technical administrative function. By physically assembling and rearranging the blocks, every participant leaves with a clear, visual model of how their SAP roles align with real-world business processes, and where risks and/or inefficiencies exist. Specifically, participants gain:
Understanding of where access is too broad or inconsistent
Better process mapping that helps with governance
More flexible, modular roles that can adapt to business change
Want to bring our business roles workshop to your team? Get in touch today.