Full narration of the briefing. Click a section heading to jump the player to that moment.
Here is the least glamorous truth in SAP negotiations: the biggest savings are usually captured before anyone sits at a table, in the estate itself. SAP prices your future from your present, so a bloated ECC landscape converts into a bloated subscription, and it compounds for a decade. Optimization first, negotiation second. Here are the five workstreams, in order of payback.
Workstream one. Understand the mechanism. Every SAP proposal, RISE, Cloud ERP, or a license restructure, is derived from a measurement of what you run today: users, license types, engines, and maintenance base. Whatever inflation lives in that snapshot flows straight through the conversion into your subscription metrics and stays there for the term.
The corollary is powerful: every user, engine, or license you legitimately remove before measurement is removed at one hundred percent of its cost, forever. No negotiated percentage will ever compete with that.
Workstream two. Clean the users. Three cuts, in sequence. First, dormant accounts: users with no login activity in months, still licensed, still counted.
Second, duplicates and leavers: the same human holding identities across systems, and departures never deprovisioned. Third, the over-classified: users assigned professional-grade license types whose actual transactions justify far less. In mature ECC estates these three cuts routinely reshape the count that every future subscription metric is mapped from. This is the single highest-yield week of work in the entire SAP lifecycle.
Workstream three. Rationalize what is not user-based. SAP estates accumulate engines and packages, priced on orders, revenues, or cores, that the business outgrew or never fully deployed, each still dragging annual maintenance. Inventory them against actual usage, terminate or surrender what is genuinely dead where your agreement allows, and consolidate the rest.
The maintenance base you carry into a negotiation anchors what SAP expects you to spend forever; shrinking it honestly resets that anchor before the conversation begins.
Workstream four. Deal with indirect and digital access before SAP raises it. Third-party systems reading and writing to your SAP core, e-commerce platforms, warehouse systems, custom apps, create licensing exposure that SAP has historically weaponized mid-negotiation, converting an audit surprise into signing pressure. Map the integrations now, quantify the exposure under document-based licensing, and decide your posture while it is still your decision.
An exposure you found is a line item you negotiate. An exposure they found is leverage you handed over.
Workstream five. Only now, convert. With users cleaned, engines rationalized, maintenance right-sized, and indirect access resolved, the estate SAP measures is the estate you actually use. The FUE mapping starts from truth, landing you in a defensible tier instead of an inflated one.
And your conversion credits apply against a smaller, sharper subscription rather than subsidizing bloat. Optimization is not preparation for the negotiation. It is the negotiation, conducted where SAP cannot argue back.
One last point. At Redress Compliance we run estate optimization and the negotiation that follows on a pure contingency basis. Our fee is 25 percent of what we save you. If we save you nothing, you pay nothing.
Before SAP measures, let us optimize. com.
Redress Compliance works on contingency: our fee is 25 percent of what we save you. Nothing saved, nothing paid. Independent, buyer side only, never vendor funded.
Talk to a SAP negotiator