A global bank executed a multi-wave S/4HANA migration across nine business units, applied a per-wave FUE rebuild discipline, and recovered $22M from the originally proposed conversion contract value.
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The bank operated a federated SAP estate across nine business units — retail banking, commercial banking, investment banking, capital markets, asset management, private banking, treasury, group risk, and group finance. The estate had grown via acquisition over fifteen years and carried 26,800 Named Users plus eleven production engines under five distinct contractual structures across the business units.
The S/4HANA migration programme was a multi-year initiative with board approval and a target completion eighteen months out. SAP's opening proposal was a single-shot conversion priced at $74.6M of incremental licence value, structured as a master conversion contract that would have collapsed the five existing contractual structures into a single new agreement at S/4HANA Private Cloud terms.
The Group CTO engaged us with a brief unusual in scope: not a single conversion negotiation but a multi-wave structural redesign. The bank wanted the conversion economics rebuilt under a phased programme that preserved the existing contractual advantages of the business units that had favourable legacy terms.
SAP's opening position rested on a single-shot proposition with three commercial arguments. First, the consolidation of nine business units onto a single S/4HANA Private Cloud Edition would unlock approximately fifteen per cent of operational savings against the prior fragmented estate. Second, the single-shot pricing carried a multi-business-unit discount that would expire if the conversion ran phased. Third, the new master agreement would standardise the entitlement terms across the bank, reducing the SAM overhead in the longer term.
The headline figure broke into approximately $52M of Named User and engine conversion value, $14M of HANA database extension, and $8.6M of new module add-ons including SAP Analytics Cloud, S/4HANA Cloud for Treasury, and the SAP Concur integration the bank had not previously held licences for.
The contractual framing positioned the phased alternative as commercially unfavourable. The implication was that splitting the conversion across waves would forfeit the multi-business-unit discount and result in a higher cumulative cost than the single-shot proposal. The framing was sophisticated but factually contestable on the specific terms of the legacy contracts.
We worked the conversion as a contract-design problem rather than a price-negotiation problem. Five structural moves carried the reduction across the multi-wave programme.
Each of the nine waves carried its own FUE audit before the wave commenced. The cumulative rebuild reduced the Named User and engine conversion baseline from 30,400 FUEs to 21,800 FUEs across the programme — a twenty-eight per cent reduction.
Three business units carried legacy contractual terms more favourable than the proposed S/4HANA Private Cloud Edition standard. We negotiated retention of those terms within the new master agreement as exhibit schedules, preserving approximately $6.4M of contractual advantage across the conversion.
The HANA database extension was rebuilt against measured footprint at the start of each wave, with the cumulative entitlement built up incrementally rather than provisioned in a single-shot estimate. The cumulative HANA extension cost reduced by approximately fifty-eight per cent against the single-shot quote.
The proposed module add-ons were reviewed against actual deployment plans wave by wave. SAP Analytics Cloud was retained at a reduced subscription. S/4HANA Cloud for Treasury was retained at the standard tier with a future-upgrade right at fixed pricing. The Concur integration line was retired entirely — the bank operated an existing expense management system that the integration would have duplicated.
We rebutted the SAP framing that the phased conversion would forfeit the multi-business-unit discount. The contractual analysis showed the discount was tied to the cumulative committed FUE volume across the programme, not to the timing of the conversion. SAP accepted the preservation of the discount under the phased structure.
The phased migration closed at a cumulative commitment of $52.6M against the opening single-shot $74.6M, a thirty per cent reduction. The conversion ran across nine waves over the eighteen-month programme window, with per-wave FUE audits documented in the contractual schedule.
Contractually, we secured retention of three legacy contractual structures as exhibit schedules to the master agreement, a phased HANA extension priced on measured footprint at each wave, and a wave-level termination right permitting the bank to pause or rescope subsequent waves without commercial penalty.
The Group SAM function operates the conversion as a continuous programme rather than a one-time event. The FUE audit discipline is now embedded in the wave-management governance and the documentation cadence carries forward into the post-conversion run-state.
The single-shot conversion would have collapsed fifteen years of negotiated contractual advantage into one new agreement. The work was to preserve what we had while building what we needed.
Multi-wave conversion governance, per-wave FUE audits, and contract-design work for organisations running phased S/4HANA programmes.
Read the brief →Master agreement work, exhibit-schedule design, and clause-level drafting for organisations consolidating multiple legacy SAP contracts.
Read the brief →Conversion economics, phased migration mechanics, and the contractual structures that preserve negotiated advantage.
Reference on phased migration, per-wave FUE audits, and contract-design work for multi-business-unit estates.
How a global financial services group converted to S/4HANA in three waves with preserved legacy entitlements.
Cluster pillar on conversion economics, phased migration mechanics, and contract design.
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