The world's largest aviation ground services provider brings its SAP license strategy, audit readiness, and migration decision to independent advisors.
Swissport, the world's largest aviation ground services provider, has engaged Redress Compliance for independent buyer side SAP advisory covering license strategy, audit readiness, and the S/4HANA and RISE decision path.
The agreement covers independent buyer side advisory across Swissport's SAP estate: an entitlement and usage baseline, audit readiness, renewal and contract strategy, and the evaluation of S/4HANA and RISE with SAP against a clean baseline.
Co founders Fredrik Filipsson and Morten Andersen lead the work, bringing publisher side experience from Oracle, IBM, and SAP ecosystems to the buyer's side of the table.
Independent advisory removes the structural conflicts that shape most SAP advice. System integrators earn implementation revenue from a migration decision, and resellers earn margin on the licenses they recommend; advice funded by either inherits the bias.
A workforce in the hundreds of thousands measured against user based metrics, seasonal volume swings, and operational systems at hundreds of airports exchanging data with SAP. That profile concentrates exactly the metric definition and indirect access questions where independent review pays for itself, with the SAP licensing framework as the reference text.
SAP's 2027 mainstream maintenance milestone for ECC, documented in its maintenance program, is compressing migration decisions across the installed base, and proposal quality varies enormously under that time pressure.
The decision paths facing large ECC estates
| Path | What it means | The commercial watch point |
|---|---|---|
| RISE with SAP | Subscription bundle in SAP's cloud | Baseline inflation and exit terms |
| S/4HANA on premise | New license and contract conversion | Conversion credits and shelfware carryover |
| Stay on ECC | Extended or third party maintenance | Support cost versus migration deferral value |
| Selective transformation | Hybrid by business line | Integration licensing and indirect access |
Because urgency is the vendor's pricing power. A buyer with a verified baseline and a costed stay put option negotiates the migration as a choice rather than a deadline, which is the posture this engagement is built to create.
Large operators increasingly separate advice from implementation. The decisions at stake in an SAP migration are decade long commitments, and the market is recognizing that the cheapest advice is the kind paid for once, by the party it serves.
Swissport publishes its operational footprint, serving airlines at hundreds of airports worldwide, on its corporate site. The scale explains why metric definitions move material money in estates like this.
The standard advice is to let your implementation partner guide the S/4HANA decision because they know your estate best. We disagree. In roughly 20 to 30 SAP advisory engagements Fredrik Filipsson led in 2024 to 2025, recommendations from implementation linked advisors aligned with the option generating the most implementation revenue in nearly every case we reviewed, and the license commercials were treated as an afterthought to the program plan. The buyer side move is to separate the license and commercial baseline from the implementation question entirely, and to let the party with no stake in the answer hold the pen on the negotiation strategy.
Three cuts of our advisory engagement file frame the size of the opportunity.
Source: Redress Compliance advisory engagement file, 2024 to 2025.
Five moves turn this analysis into a lower invoice on the next renewal.
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Swissport engaged Redress Compliance in March 2026 for independent buyer side SAP advisory covering its license baseline, audit readiness, renewal strategy, and the S/4HANA and RISE decision path.
Swissport is the world's largest aviation ground services and cargo handling provider, serving airlines at hundreds of airports worldwide with a workforce in the hundreds of thousands. That scale makes SAP metric definitions and indirect access materially expensive questions.
It means advice paid for only by the software buyer, with no implementation revenue, reseller margin, or vendor relationship behind the recommendation. The advisor's only commercial interest is the client's outcome.
SAP's mainstream maintenance for ECC runs to 2027 for most estates, which compresses migration decisions across the installed base. Buyers who baseline entitlements and cost the stay put option negotiate that deadline as a choice instead of a forced march.
No. Redress Compliance provides licensing, negotiation, and audit advisory only. Keeping implementation out of the revenue model is what keeps the migration recommendation independent.
The baseline, benchmark, and sequencing moves that put SAP negotiations on buyer terms.
Used across more than five hundred enterprise engagements. Independent. Buyer side. Built for procurement leaders running the next renewal cycle.
Advice is cheapest when it is paid for once, by the party it serves. Everything else is sales with a methodology attached.
500+ enterprise clients. 11 vendor practices. Industry recognized. One conversation can change what you pay for the next three years.
One buyer side briefing a week. Pricing moves, audit signals, and the levers that work. No vendor spin.
