By Andrea Greuel
Sometimes I hear customers say: “I don’t use the License Administration Workbench (LAW) from SAP. I send the various protocols and leave it to SAP to consolidate them.” This statement always leaves me wondering when I hear it.
SAP has always delivered the SAP system measurement tool, also known as transaction USMM, with the SAP system. This has to be executed when SAP sends the letter requesting an SAP system measurement, which is usually once a year.
Many years ago it got more and more common to have more than one SAP system. The consequence was to measure each system individually and end up having a number of SAP system measurement protocols. But only one SAP named user license is needed per person according to most SAP contracts. Multiple systems and system measurements make it hard to find out how many named user licenses are really needed because many users have an account on more than one SAP system. Several years ago, SAP introduced the License Administration Workbench tool to consolidate the multiple system measurement protocols into one.
This is still a challenge for a lot of companies because the user consolidation is often based on historical events. How do you know a person with a user ID in one system that is made of a combination of their first and last names is identical to the user on another system where the ID is first initial and last name, for example? LAW consolidation options are limited and can only be as good as the quality of the data. If there is no common field to use for user consolidation, it is basically impossible. This leads to organizations using Microsoft Access or Excel and a lot of manual work.
Is it a good idea to leave the consolidation up to SAP without the option to control the results?
I always recommend doing the user consolidation in-house before sending the LAW report to SAP. That way you know what your current SAP license position is. The standard SAP measurement tools are often not sufficient or way too time consuming, in any case. Having an SAP-independent Software License Optimization solution to easily do named user consolidation and optimization on a regular basis is the best approach for many reasons:
- It allows your organization to know, at any given time, with a press of a button, what its current SAP license position is
- It allows your organization to know that it is compliant with the SAP License agreement
- It provides a way to check the results from SAP, among other advantages.
To learn more about optimized management of SAP licenses, please view our on-demand webinar: SAP License Management Challenges and Opportunities. In this webinar you'll hear from R "Ray" Wang, Founder and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research and author of the popular blog: A Software Insider's Point of View.