Full narration of the briefing. Click a section heading to jump the player to that moment.
There is one belief that costs more than any other in this conversation, and it is held sincerely by more than half the buyers we meet. The belief is that moving to RISE removes indirect access exposure. It does not. Digital access liability follows your integrations, not your hosting arrangement, so it travels straight across into the new agreement.
And it travels into an agreement that is longer, larger and harder to leave than the one you have now. Claire is going to explain the mechanics, and then we will talk about why an unresolved exposure carried into a longer commitment is the worst possible time to negotiate it.
The model itself is not complicated. Since 2018 SAP prices third party integration by document rather than by user. Nine document types are counted, sales orders, purchase orders, invoices and the rest, created in the SAP core by systems outside it. Those documents convert into Full Use Equivalents, and in most contracts one FUE represents about a thousand documents.
So your integration architecture, every bolt on, every portal, every robotic process, every partner feed, is quietly generating a licence metric. And the counts are auditable, because SAP measures against named tables rather than against an estimate anybody can argue about.
And here is why it lands now rather than at some other point. The migration to S/4HANA or RISE is the event that applies the new model. Your legacy named user licences convert, and the digital access position converts with them. So a document count that has been drifting upward quietly for years, unmeasured and unpriced, gets crystallised into a contract number at exactly the moment you have the least room to argue.
That is not a trap anybody set. It is simply the arithmetic of the conversion, and it is entirely predictable, which is why measuring it early is the whole of the defence.
Now the part that decides the next ten years rather than this contract. The first document volume you agree becomes the anchor, and every renewal is negotiated upward from it. It is a floor, not a ceiling. Which means an inflated first count is not a one time overpayment, it is a permanent baseline with an escalator applied to it.
And on the other side, this is also where the largest reductions live: careful work on what actually counts, what qualifies for waiver, and what is being double counted has produced FUE reductions in the range of thirty to sixty percent. That is not a rounding adjustment, that is a different contract.
So the sequencing rule is absolute. Settle the document count and its pricing before signing, not during the conversion. An exposure discovered mid negotiation converts directly into scope, because the cleanest way for everyone to make it disappear is for you to buy a bigger bundle. That is exactly what we see: indirect access surfaced in three of five estates and was used to push a larger commitment than the workload justified.
Measured early by you, it is a number you manage. Discovered late by them, it is leverage, and an unresolved exposure carried into a longer commitment gets negotiated later from a much weaker position.
And there are real levers, not just diligence. Many integrations qualify under the indirect access waiver paths, and those have to be claimed rather than granted. Documents get double counted where a chain of systems touches the same transaction, and untangling the chain reduces the count without changing anything technically. And a surprising share of what gets counted is not genuinely third party at all once the architecture is examined properly.
None of that is available to you after signature, because the number on the order form becomes the agreed fact. All of it is available before, and it is a few weeks of work.
Here is the move. Measure your own document count before SAP measures it for you, against the same nine types and the same tables, and get it reviewed by someone who has argued one of these before. Then bring the number to the table yourself, along with the waiver claims and the double counting you have already stripped out. A buyer who arrives with their own measured position negotiates a price.
A buyer who waits to be told negotiates a settlement. Next time, Daniel and I take the two meters running underneath the subscription: the platform credits and the AI units.
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. Want Redress to contact you? Reach out and we respond the same day.
Talk to a ServiceNow negotiator