Lowering the cost of information technology is a constantly appearing element of budgeting the IT resources of many organizations.
In the case of a SAP environment, licensing costs often make a particularly large contribution to overall IT costs.
Often, organizations also regularly review their licenses to find savings.
In today's tip, we cover how to take the first step towards lowering your SAP licensing costs.
Often this first step helps us to increase the level of security (so two birds with one stone). The problem, however, can be a lack of awareness (not ignorance, I believe), or simply a 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 provided SAP accounts?
It may be surprising how often this data is out of date.
The reason we're describing this may be because users are NOT active but still counted while monitoring SAP licenses.
And it is these users that represent a significant savings potential for SAP licenses.
Here are few examples:
- former employees,
- employees who are absent from the organization for an extended period of time (e.g. parental leave),
- current employees who do not use their SAP user for a long time.
During authorization projects, we can see another trend - often personnel changes are not taken into account in license management. This means that the number of employees does not reflect reality.
As a result, users that are no longer needed are still included in license monitoring, leading to unnecessarily increasing licensing costs. In some cases, remedial action will allow significant cost reductions.
Regularly check SAP users (e.g. every six months) to regularly identify inactive users in your systems. One way is to make a standard RSUSR200 report. Lists users with their last login date. In addition, on the market of tools supporting SAP administration, there are those dedicated to these tasks in order to effectively automate license optimization while maintaining high quality.
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