SAP Licence Advisory

Creating visibility of your current SAP licences and assisting you in obtaining the right commercial flexibility for your modernisation journey.

At Libertas, we support your entire SAP journey, guiding you through the complexities of SAP licensing to manage risks, maximise commercial value, and empower your business to thrive.

What does a good deal look like?

How do I secure this deal?

Without understanding and addressing these questions, customers often experience SAP software agreements that are complex to manage, contain significant shelfware, do not provide the necessary flexibility to support current business needs and are almost impossible to measure compliance.

At Libertas, not only do we assist with securing the deal at the lowest possible price, more importantly, we leverage our decades of SAP licensing experience and proven approach to ensure you secure an agreement that best supports your immediate objectives while providing the necessary protection in support of your long-term goals.

Our Services

Crafting the right SAP commercial agreement for your business is more than just identifying a bill of materials and negotiating a price. It's also about choosing the right licensing model and safeguarding against future uncertainties and unplanned expenses.

At Libertas, we go beyond securing the lowest price. We leverage our decades of SAP licensing experience and proven methods to ensure you secure an agreement that supports your immediate objectives and provides protection for your long-term goals.

Confidence in the BOM

Am I confident I understand the bill of materials being proposed, the value and likely use of each item?

Understanding Entitlements (Products) & Metrics

Do I have a good understanding of the various entitlements (products) and associated metrics?

Verification

Do I know how to verify my needs against these entitlements and metrics?

Measurement

Do I know how to measure my usage of these entitlements and metrics in future?

Adjustment for Compliance

Do I know how to adjust my usage of the metrics and entitlements to ensure compliance?

Usage Risk Factors

Do I know which entitlements and metrics pose the most risk to uncertain usage?

Project Demands & Uncertainty

Have I built in commercial flexibility to align with the project demands and uncertainty?

Business Uncertainty

Have I built in commercial flexibility to address future business uncertainty?

Awareness of Commercial Terms

Am I aware of all the commercial terms available to address these risks and uncertainties?

Triggering Terms

Do I know how to trigger these commercial terms and what would drive the need to trigger them?

A GOOD DEAL?

What does a good deal look like and how do I know?

SAP Licence Optimisation

Understanding your SAP licence consumption versus entitlements can be challenging due to complex entitlements, disparate metrics, and incomplete auditing tools. Libertas helps you comprehensively understand your entitlements, accurately assess your usage, and explore commercial options to unlock value and safeguard your future.

SAP Audit Support

SAP audits, whether standard or enhanced, can be daunting. With risks like Indirect Access and back maintenance fees, audits can pose significant financial liabilities. Libertas helps you take control, understand your options, and proceed with confidence.

SAP Licence Negotiation

Securing an SAP agreement that aligns with your current and future business objectives is challenging. Often, contracts meet product needs but little else. Libertas helps you evaluate all commercial options, targeting those that match your needs. We guide you through every step of the negotiation process to secure the right agreement with the right terms at the right price.

3rd Party Support Evaluation

Third-party maintenance providers can offer substantial savings over SAP's standard maintenance offerings but also carry risks. Libertas ensures you are well-prepared, confident in your compliance position, aligned with your software needs, and aware of future pathways back to mainstream support.

SAP Licensing Optimisation

Understanding your SAP licence consumption versus entitlements can be challenging due to complex entitlements, disparate metrics, and incomplete auditing tools. Libertas helps you comprehensively understand your entitlements, accurately assess your usage, and explore commercial options to unlock value and safeguard your future.

SAP Audit Support

SAP audits, whether standard or enhanced, can be daunting. With risks like Indirect Access and back maintenance fees, audits can pose significant financial liabilities. Libertas helps you take control, understand your options, and proceed with confidence.

SAP License Negotiation

Securing an SAP agreement that aligns with your current and future business objectives is challenging. Often, contracts meet product needs but little else. Libertas helps you evaluate all commercial options, targeting those that match your needs. We guide you through every step of the negotiation process to secure the right agreement with the right terms at the right price.

3rd Party Support Evaluation

Third-party maintenance providers can offer substantial savings over SAP's standard maintenance offerings but also carry risks. Libertas ensures you are well-prepared, confident in your compliance position, aligned with your software needs, and aware of future pathways back to mainstream support.

Our approach to securing the right SAP licence agreement that includes the commercial structures to support your current and future objectives at the lowest cost is based on a 3-step model.

SAP Product Needs Analysis

The foundation to any licence negotiation, reset or compliance assessment is to understand what you own today and what you are using. This allows for a baseline of usage to compare to current agreements and to build upon when thinking of upgrading or converting. To ensure our process delivers the most accurate and valuable outcome as possible, Libertas performs the following:
i. Consolidate and analyse all contractual entitlements.
ii. Measure the current use of these entitlements, through both Direct Access and Indirect Access, based on the contractual entitlements.
iii. Identify future SAP product needs through a demand profiling and roadmap approach. These future needs will then be mapped against the current usage to develop an accurate and optimised bill of materials.

Financial and Commercial Planning

Once the product needs and timing have been identified, the next step is to identify the commercial needs to be reflected in the agreement. Elements such as financial commitment, total cost of ownership, timing, flexibility, capex vs opex, and future protection will all be considered. It will be these elements that will influence the structure of the agreement that best aligns with your broader objectives. Libertas will propose a number of commercial models that can be evaluated based on your technical and commercial needs and risks.

Contract Negotiation and Execution

To secure an agreement that reflects both your SAP product needs and commercial objectives at the most affordable price will require a number of concessions from SAP. To secure these concessions, a negotiation strategy must be developed that leverages SAP’s core value drivers. Libertas will assist in developing this strategy based on agreed roles, responsibilities and tactics and participate in the final negotiation under your instructions.

Customer Success Stories

We take pride in our track record of delivering great results for our customers.

Retail

Situation

Pre-separation from parent

Consumer facing organization

Very old legacy systems (including SAP)

Outdated agreements that do not reflect current business needs

Very significant software liability

Outcome

Negotiated SAP contracts to remove all liability at 15% of the discounted exposure.

SAP Software contracts reflect business needs and protects from future uncertainty.

Utility

Situation

Post merger of businesses

Business facing cost pressures

Committed to S/4 HANA journey

Significant investment in SAP Software

Significant cost over-runs

Outcome

Renegotiated SAP Software contracts realising audited savings of $79M over 5 years.

SAP Software contracts reflect business needs and protects from future uncertainty.

Manufacturing

Situation

Significant cost pressures —labour and energy

Unstable ECC environment

Very weak contractual position

Self Managed Maintenance

Acceptable business case for change

Outcome

Renegotiated SAP Software contracts saving $18M over 5 years of contracted SAP spend.

Returned the customer to SAP support without having to pay back maintenance.

Pharmaceutical

Situation

Business facing cost pressures

Stable ECC environment

Complex architectural and integration landscape

Significant SAP software liability

Weak position to negotiate

Outcome

Designed and deployed a technical remediation that reduced the liability by 94%.

The solution was formally verified by the SAP Global Licence Audit Compliance team.

Contact Libertas today to discuss your unique SAP S/4HANA transformation journey