Organizations that implement SAP need to continuously care about their SAP environment. Although this can sometimes be a complex process as companies may find it difficult to achieve a clear overview of the SAP licensing rules and usage rights. It is crucial that organizations actively monitor their license usage to avoid massive license gaps and license fee cost that come as a result of audit or non-compliance.
It becomes vital for SAP-Clients to have an SAP License Administration Workbench (LAW) tool which fundamentally reports license usage statement to SAP for review as it is mandatory for client to participate in an annual license Audit. It is however also very important to note that LAW only takes account the license type set up at account creation and not the actual use of the SAP solution. SAP contracts are configured such that annual fees cannot be decreased during the contract duration so SAP-Clients must effectively optimize user accounts prior to the annual measurement by LAW to subsequently avoid any increase in fees.
In order to have a successful SAP license management, organizations need to have deep understanding of SAP agreements, their purchased entitlements, the actual SAP software deployment and utilization as well as an understanding of the requirements, this would enable organizations maximize their ROI of their SAP investment and keep a close eye on their license consumption.
Some of the challenge SAP-clients face includes:
- A lack of SAP licensing knowledge
- Misinformation or lack of understanding of the SAP agreements.
- Licensing rules and unclear metrics
- Over deployed and unused software
- Unknown indirect access from 3rd party applications
For SAP-clients to stay compliant and avoid audit penalties, it is important to understand the following methodologies and steps.
Named User Classification: SAP license Audit Workbench measures SAP named users on how customers have classified them, for every user created in the system, you are required to assign one of the named user license you own, the professional license is the most expensive production license, so employee or self-service license should be created for users that require limited access to the SAP system as customers classified wrongly could lead to buying wrong licenses, so failing to optimize users can result to a significant over licensing. And failing to lock or expire user account can lead to over licensing as the LAW simply count active user accounts regardless of whether used or not.
Measure Indirect Access: Indirect access consumption have been a major issue and concern for SAP-clients, with this complexities SAP investigates 3rd party applications with the SAP own system so this becomes vital to identify indirect access, an architecture diagram can be built to better understand the applications connected to the SAP system and what data is being transferred between the different systems this would save a lot of cost and help organization negotiate sufficient licensing with SAP.
The SAP License Audit Workbench is not a SAM tool!
There are 2 types of SAP license audit; Self-declaration (which happens annually) and an Enhanced SAP License Audit, which SAP can conduct upon provision of notice.
A self-declaration is not technically a proper license audit as it involves the self-declaration of software use based the customers own configurations. An Enhanced SAP License Audit can involve skilled auditors performing more targeted analysis unearthing latent undiscovered licensing risks that the SAP License Audit Workbench does not provide visibility of.
Aspera Smart Track SAP License control ensures your company pays only for the licenses you need. Also features the most intelligent SAP rule definitions in the Software Asset Management (SAM) industry. The SAP landscape changes daily as a huge network of systems and user accounts is constantly reconfigured which optimizes the most cost-effective licenses while ensuring your compliance with SAP’s measurements.