SAP License Costs - How to Optimize Them?

Reducing IT costs is a constantly recurring aspect of budget planning for many organizations.
In the case of an SAP environment, licensing costs are often a particularly large contributor to overall IT costs.
Often, too, the organization regularly conducts a review of its licenses to find savings.

In today's tip, we discuss how to take the first step toward lowering SAP license costs.

Tips to reduce SAP license costs

Often this first step helps us increase the level of security (so two birds with one stone). However, the problem may be lack of awareness (I believe not ignorance), or simply lack of resources.

The area with the greatest potential for cost optimization is users

How many employees in your company really use SAP in their daily work?

How do these users use the SAP accounts provided?

It can be surprising how often this data is out of date.

The reason we describe this may be that users are NOT active, but are still counted when monitoring SAP licenses.
And it is these users who represent a significant potential for SAP license savings.

Here are some examples:

- former employees,
- Employees who are not present in the organization for an extended period of time (such as parental leave),
- Current employees who have not used their SAP user for a long time.

During authorization projects we see another trend - often personnel changes are not included in license management. This means that the number of employees does not reflect reality.

As a result, users who are no longer needed - are still included when monitoring licenses, leading to unnecessarily rising licensing costs. In some cases, remedial actions will reduce costs significantly.

Our Tip:

Check SAP users regularly (e.g., every six months) to regularly identify inactive users on your systems. One way to do this is to run the standard RSUSR200 report. It lists users with their last login date. In addition, there are SAP administration support tools on the market that are dedicated to these tasks so that license optimization can be effectively automated while maintaining high quality.