SAP FUE Licensing: How to Reduce Costs and Improve Security

The new SAP licensing structure is a hot topic for all SAP users right now, and with good reason: it represents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to rationalize your SAP license estate, resolve issues in your current SAP roles, and optimize your costs in the process.

SAP has been proactive in contacting organizations with enticing offers to migrate to RISE or S/4HANA and move onto their new Full Use Equivalent (FUE) licensing model in the process. Many report that SAP has presented time-limited offers and other transition incentives to 'encourage' them to make the change.

If that sounds familiar, be advised: it is essential to gain a full understanding of your current state and future options before taking up any of these offers. With FUEs intrinsically linked to roles and authorizations and infrastructure scale, organizations should first take these three critical actions:

1. Examine your company's actual SAP usage

2. Produce a licensing requirements target model

3. Remediate inflated access

Turnkey is helping organizations RISE right through our SAP License Review. This blog will give you clarity on why conducting a license review is a critical step in moving to SAP's new model, where organizations typically take a wrong turn on their review journey, and how to take the optimal route.

Where can SAP license reviews go wrong?

We've seen many organizations migrate to the new SAP FUE license model with the best of intentions, but then experience at least one of three common errors along the way:

• Submitting the STAR report prematurely: The S/4HANA Trusted Authorization Review, aka the STAR report, helps clarify your current license position by estimating the number of FUEs you'll need when migrating from ECC to S/4HANA. Once run, organizations submit their results to SAP so users can be categorized under FUEs accordingly. What some organizations don't realize, however, is that they have the opportunity to review and remediate their results before submitting them to SAP. Examining and addressing over-inflated access identified in the initial STAR report - and then rerunning the report - can give you compliance leverage and a stronger negotiating position.

  For example, one company we recently worked with started with less than a hundred professional users in ECC but generated a STAR report that estimated the need for thousands of licenses under the new model. That's because the report reviews roles and authorizations without adjusting for actual usage. In their case, pre-remediation submission of the STAR report risked exposing the business to £4.5 million in costs for licenses they didn't need.

• Treating security as an afterthought: All too often, speed is prioritized over security, resulting in security issues at go-live, backlogs of support tickets, and ongoing compliance risks. Establishing a target security model and right-sizing access ahead of your move to S/4HANA or RISE reduces these risks and the operational disruption that accompanies them. Focusing on security at the outset will enable a smoother migration, lock in cost savings, and protect your transformation and long-term SAP investments.
• Misaligned infrastructure: There remains a gap in understanding on the relationship between infrastructure and FUE counts. While scaling FUEs back to a minimum level may seem like the best course of action from a cost perspective, increasing the FUE count to account for infrastructure needs may in fact be the best way to future-proof a larger organization's infrastructure.

  For example, due to their much larger infrastructure needs, one of our clients chose to purchase almost double the FUEs they needed based on user requirements. In doing so they freed themselves from strict memory limits, reduced their future scale-out needs, and saved over US$4 million at list price.

How to get your SAP license review right

At Turnkey, we're helping organizations RISE right through our SAP License Review and Remediation services. In practice, this involves an initial assessment  of your organization's potential FUE exposure before any data is shared with SAP. We then provide a licensing requirements target based on the principle of least privilege and advise or assist in role remediation and redesign to help you reduce costs, improve security, and streamline user experience.

Our tried-and-trusted four-phase process covers all the bases, regardless of the size, complexity, and current licensing position of your organization:

• Phase One - User analysis and target state creation: We first engage your internal SAP team to get access to your STAR report data and/or access data and usage information. Applying accelerator-driven methodology, our team will interrogate your actual system usage versus current role allocation to identify discrepancies between assigned and utilized transactions and functions. As an output, we provide you with a target security model and license model to work toward.
• Phase Two - Quick win and role impact identification: During this next stage, we pinpoint quick wins through a role impact assessment. We apply this process to evaluate which roles may require remediation or redesign based on your target model and what to prioritize first.
• Phase Three - Roadmap creation: We create a bespoke roadmap, outlining the remediation and redesign activities required to achieve your target security and license model and forward-looking infrastructure requirements. We then equip you to present on the ROI of this work to C-level stakeholders, demonstrating how it will deliver cost efficiency, scalability, compliance, and security resilience.
• Phase Four - Targeted role remediation: Finally, subject to individual business needs, we remediate your SAP entitlements to match your target security and license model. This involves role assignment housekeeping to remove unused and unnecessary roles, role remediation to mitigate inflated FUE license measures, and user remediation to align SAP users to the newly developed authorization solution.

Upon completion, we recommend running a STAR report and comparing the new data with the old to quantify the scale of possible savings. We can also continue to support you through a referral to the SAP license negotiation specialists at Invictus Partners or ongoing access governance support through our Bedrock Managed Service.

Having explored the detailed process, you might be wondering: How do successful organizations ensure they capture maximum value from their license review? The answer  lies in leveraging specialized expertise.

In summary: Why partner with experts

The new SAP FUE licensing, security, and infrastructure are complex and interconnected. That's why leveraging external support from experts such as Turnkey is so valuable. We understand the intricate relationship between FUEs and infrastructure and have decades of experience optimizing SAP roles and authorizations for the world's leading companies.

Our comprehensive approach helps you establish a target security model in line with your business goals, proactively mitigate compliance risks, pre-empt and avoid security pitfalls in your migration, and achieve cost savings by reducing total FUEs by up to 50%.

With our help, organizations just like yours are discovering improved process efficiency, stronger security, and lower SAP license costs. Turn the headache of FUE licensing into an opportunity by getting in touch with us today.