Full narration of the briefing. Click a section heading to jump the player to that moment.
If you only watch one session of this series, watch this one. RISE prices on Full Use Equivalents, a weighted unit that collapses your existing named user categories at defined ratios. The resulting count drives the subscription for the entire term, and every subsequent renewal is measured from it. Which produces a rule that sounds obvious and is almost universally ignored: fix the count before you argue the rate.
A buyer who wins five points of discount on an inflated count has lost. A buyer who removes twenty percent of the count at list has won. Claire is going to show you exactly where the inflation lives.
Start with the ladder, because everything turns on it. A professional user weighs one point zero. A functional user and a developer weigh nought point five. A self service user weighs nought point two.
A productivity user weighs nought point one. So a professional user costs ten times a productivity user for the same headcount. And in a typical estate, professional users are only ten to twenty percent of the population, functional thirty to forty, self service forty to sixty, and productivity five to ten. Which means the great majority of your people belong at the cheap end of that ladder, and the entire negotiation is about whether they are actually classified there.
And they usually are not, for a reason that is nobody's fault. Most buyers walk in with the count taken straight from their old ECC named user inventory. That inventory carries a decade of role drift, template defaults applied at project go lives, and leavers who were never removed. Converting it to FUE at face value prices all of that into the subscription, forever.
This is the crucial difference from an on premise contract: an over classified user in ECC was a compliance risk you might never pay for, and an over classified user in RISE is a line on every invoice for the whole term. The same sloppiness costs an order of magnitude more once it is a subscription.
So here is the work, and it is the highest return work in the programme. Rebuild the count from ninety days of actual transaction logs rather than from the licence table. What people did, not what they were entitled to do. That reclassifies borderline users down the ladder, professional to functional, functional to self service, and across the record it removed fifteen to thirty percent of FUE before signing.
Separately, first FUE proposals sat ten to twenty five percent above what a clean reclassification supported, with a median around eighteen percent. Those two figures are different measurements of the same gap, and both of them are money.
Now put a price on it. Private cloud list runs roughly two hundred and twenty to two hundred and eighty euros per FUE per month, with discounts of twenty five to fifty percent for mid market and fifty to seventy percent at global enterprise scale, strongest at their year end. Do the arithmetic on your own estate and the reason the count matters more than the rate becomes obvious. Twenty percent off an inflated count of three thousand is a much larger number than five points off the rate, and unlike the rate it never comes back at renewal, because the count you sign becomes the floor you renew from.
And the sequence matters as much as the work. Reclassify your users first, then validate SAP's conversion against your reclassification. Never the other way around, because whichever model arrives first becomes the reference and everything afterwards is argued as an exception to it. If their mapping lands before your evidence, you spend the negotiation justifying reductions.
If your evidence lands first, they spend it justifying additions. The work is identical. The order changes who carries the burden of proof, and on a number this large that is worth more than any concession you will be offered.
Here is the move. Pull ninety days of transaction logs now, before any proposal exists, and build the classification from behaviour. Get your Basis and security people to own it, because it is their data and their credibility. Then hold one rule through the whole negotiation: no discussion of rate until the count is agreed.
It is a slightly uncomfortable conversation to have with an account team that wants to talk price, and it is worth more than everything else in this series combined. Next time, Daniel and I take the comparison that decides whether any of this saves money at all.
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