SAP Licence Optimisation and Audit as a Service

Never worry about another SAP Licence Audit again  

SAP Licence audits can be fraught; they take a lot of time, lots of manual effort, communications, and there is always the nagging worry that you might have some previously unknown financial exposure as a consequence.

Even organisations with the best on-boarding and off-boarding processes still have concerns that something will come up during the audit that could cause some unexpected costs.

In reality most organisations needn't worry as, after optimisation, they are typically overlicensed because they overallocate and mis-license their employees, giving them rights and permissions that they never, or rarely, use.  

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Can't we do this ourselves?

Absolutely, and many organisations do. SAP licence optimisation software also helps but, like all software, you have to have people trained to configure it, use it, and maintain it. Additionally whoever is assigned to manage the software also needs to become quite expert in your own SAP licence agreement, software contract terms in general, including definitions, interpretations and understandings, and they must keep on top of any changes to SAP licensing, such as the changes in Digital Access (Indirect Access) and S/4HANA.

More often than not, the licence audit process is seen as a technical process which often lands at the feet of the SAP security team or the basis team, taking up a lot of their time. However, their more IT focussed job role often means that the audit process does not take enough into account of the increasingly complex legal and commercial implications of the process which are equally, if not more, important.

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SAP Licence Optimisation and Audit as a Service

For these reasons we have been undertaking SAP licence optimisations and audits for over 10 years and have built up a deep understanding of SAP licensing along with many use cases and license situation comparisons. This has led to many of our customers requesting us to take the whole process off their hands and to run an annual, or in some cases, continual SAP optimisation and audit management process for them.

Our service offering is a combination of;

• Class leading and Gartner award winning cloud hosted software; ProfileTailor LicenceAuditor
• SAP licensing expertise – 10+ years of use case history
• Optimising the allocation of your licence inventory using our 3-step process, minimising any potential exposures (including Indirect Access exposures). See details of our 3 step programme here.
• Preparing and submitting your annual audit
• Providing modelling to help you negotiate a more relevant licence agreement

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Entirely non-Intrusive Process

The process is both fast and non-intrusive. We will provide you with a data collector client that simply requires an RFC userid to be set up to pull all of the relevant user activity data from your SAP systems.

The data packages that the client creates can be transferred to us and we will upload them into a hosted ProfileTailor LicenseAuditor system ready for our analysis and optimization.

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Indirect Access Licensing (Digital Access Adoption Program)

We can also help to determine potential Indirect Access Licence exposure caused by interfacing SAP to 3rd party systems. Such system connectivity and usage could be highly costly if not correctly identified and managed.

If we detect Indirect Access then we can also recommend ways to mitigate the exposure or help determine a move to an SAP Digital Access licence through the Digital Access Adoption Program (DAAP).

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S/4HANA Licensing

If you are planning on moving to S/4HANA then you also have the perfect opportunity to re-evaluate your SAP agreement and rightsize according to your organisation's usage and needs. As part of an ongoing Licence Audit and Optimisation as a Service agreement, we will also help ensure that your move to S/4HANA is the most efficient and effective from a licensing perspective through usage modelling.

If you are planning a move to S/4HANA then please read our article about the unique opportinty that you have to review and rightsize your SAP licence agreement.

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Licence Audit and Optimization as a Service Outcomes

Our service is designed as either an annual or ongoing service that will deliver the following outcomes;