A Fortune 500 industrial conglomerate ran a deep Named User cleanup across nineteen production system IDs, retired or reclassified 12,600 user accounts, and removed $7.8M of audit exposure from a pending USMM cycle.
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The client is a Fortune 500 industrial conglomerate operating nineteen productive SAP system IDs across ECC 6.0, S/4HANA, CRM, and BW/4HANA. The triennial USMM cycle was eight months out when SAP issued an early-engagement letter requesting a coordinated measurement window. Internal SAM analysis projected a Named User overage of approximately twelve thousand users across the consolidated LAW, with a worst-case audit settlement modelled at $7.8M.
The Group Compliance Director engaged us with an eight-month window to clean the Named User base, rebuild the classification methodology, and submit a defensible USMM and LAW package. The scope excluded engine and indirect access; the focus was the named-user backlog only.
The internal team had attempted a similar cleanup three years prior with limited success: the dormant-account retirement programme had stalled after fourteen months due to system-owner sign-off bottlenecks and the classification methodology had reverted to role-based assignment.
The initial LAW snapshot, run as a baseline at engagement start, showed 41,200 named-user records across the nineteen system IDs. Deduplication on email and employee-ID brought the person-level count to 29,400 active employees with SAP access. The gap of 11,800 was the cross-system multiplication of single users across multiple systems.
Of the 29,400 active users, 4,200 had no transactional activity in the prior twelve months across any system, 3,100 were technical or service accounts that had been classified as Professional in error, and 1,300 were former employees with active accounts that had survived the joiner-mover-leaver process.
On the classification side, role-based assignment was placing 18,900 users in the Professional band against verified activity-based classification suggesting 9,400 belonged in lower bands. The mis-classification accounted for $4.7M of the projected exposure.
We ran the cleanup as a structured four-track programme over twenty-six weeks, with weekly steering and monthly LAW snapshot reconciliation against the cleanup progress.
All 3,100 technical or service accounts misclassified as Professional were reviewed against function. 2,800 were converted to background user types under the contractual exemption for system-to-system accounts. 300 were retained as Professional where genuine interactive use was documented.
The 4,200 zero-activity accounts were retired through a fast-track sign-off process with delegated authority pre-agreed with system owners. Where retention was business-required, the account was reclassified to Employee Self-Service or Test/Demo as appropriate.
The 1,300 former-employee accounts were retired and a joiner-mover-leaver gap analysis was performed against HR data to identify the process failure. The HR-to-SAP deactivation pipeline was rebuilt with a daily delta feed.
The 18,900 Professional-band users were re-classified against twelve months of transaction history, with 9,400 moved to Limited Professional or Employee Self-Service on documented evidence. The evidence file was structured to USMM submission standard.
The USMM and LAW package was submitted with 17,300 net Named Users across the consolidated estate against a contracted entitlement of 18,100. The audit closed with a $0.4M true-up on a single engine metric and no Named User remediation required.
Contractually, we secured an agreed classification methodology document referenced in the next renewal, a joiner-mover-leaver SLA tied to the SAP deactivation feed, and a quarterly LAW reconciliation cadence with documented sign-off.
The cleanup recovered headroom against the contracted entitlement and removed the need for a Named User purchase that had been projected in the FY26 budget. The total exposure removed was $7.8M against the projected audit settlement.
We were eight months from a measurement window with a projected audit settlement of nearly eight million. The work was not to negotiate it down; it was to make the number disappear before it appeared.
Self-measurement preparation, dormant cleanup, classification rebuild, and submission-quality evidence files ahead of the USMM measurement window.
Read the brief →Continuous Named User rebalancing and dormant-account retirement across multi-system SAP estates.
Read the brief →Self-measurement mechanics, the LAW consolidation, and the evidence files that hold up at audit.
Measurement preparation checklist, output-file analysis methodology, and submission-quality evidence templates.
How a global media group reclassified 6,800 users and removed $5.1M from a pending audit claim.
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