SAP Measurement Doesn’t Have to be a Lot of Manual Effort

By Andrea Greuel

Does the SAP system measurement always have to involve a lot of manual effort with unknown results? This was the question a German food processing company was asking themselves.

Due to its software asset management (SAM) processes and tools, the SAP measurement for this company did, in fact, require a lot of manual effort. Every year the SAP Basis admin and a colleague had to go through a manually created list and determine the appropriate SAP license type for each
user. Figuring out the right license type for an SAP user is not easy and hardly any help or documentation is provided by the SAP system. What is the difference between an ‘operational role’ and a ‘limited operational role’? Once the SAP license classification was decided, it still needed to be updated in the system. And updates had to be done not just once for each user, but for each user per system and client, which multiplied the number of updates.

The company decided that something needed to be done to improve its SAP license management process. The expectation was to have the ability to:

1. Adjust the user license type on a regular basis with very little manual effort.
2. Calculate the current license position at any given time and ensure compliance with the SAP contract.
3. Eliminate the need for any self-written (ABAP) coding
4. Define fixed criteria for the assignment of a license type to a user and avoid case-by-case decisions. This was very important to make sure they would remain compliant with the SAP contract.  
5. Evaluate more information about a user beyond the assigned authorization roles. They wanted to avoid situations where the users have costly license types just because they have a lot of authorizations but never use them.

The company did its homework and researched the market for an SAP license management solution. They were able to make the following process improvements once they had implemented this solution:

1. Assign the user license type on a monthly basis with almost no manual effort. They are now able to use the automated license type suggestion from the tool to determine an update to the user license type in SAP.
2. Minimize manual checks by leveraging the automated reporting function to display various types of information about SAP users. No more self-written coding is needed.
3. Eliminate the use of license type 11 ‘Multi-client user’. Each user gets the right license type assigned per system.
4. Defined license rules are now used to consistently assign the license type per user. This helps ensure contract compliance.
5. Assign the right license type based on the actual usage of the SAP system, in addition to the assigned authorization roles.
6. Locked users always get license type 91 (Test) until they get unlocked.

The project sponsor provided the following list of additional SAP license optimization program benefits:

1. They have up-to-date information on their current SAP license position at all times.
2. They now have the ability to do trend analysis to better forecast future SAP software needs.
3. They are able to avoid surprises during an SAP measurement.
4. The company has better negotiation power because of its detailed knowledge of SAP system usage.
5. They have optimized licensing costs by leveraging data that wasn’t available before, such as detailed SAP usage data.

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To learn more about SAP license optimization, please view our on-demand webinar: SAP
Software Licenses Could be Costing You.