A global industrial group rebalanced its Named User pool across forty-three SAP system IDs, retired 5,800 dormant identities, and reset the renewal entitlement at sixty-five per cent below the SAP opening number.
Every result on this site is anonymised at the client's request. Specific figures are real and verifiable through a confidentiality-protected reference call arranged on request.
The client is a top-fifty industrial manufacturer with operations across twenty-three legal entities and forty-three productive SAP system identifiers running a mixed ECC and S/4HANA estate alongside SuccessFactors. A pending three-year renewal opened with a $9.4M annual run-rate against the prior $4.1M contract, with the increase attributed to Named User growth from acquisitions, the S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition migration in two divisions, and a Recruiting subscriber line that had grown unbounded.
The CIO and CPO escalated the renewal to a steering group and engaged us to test SAP's count before commercial negotiations opened. The brief excluded engine metrics and indirect access; the focus was Named User and SuccessFactors subscriber count rebuild only.
The opening assumption inside the client's procurement team was that the underlying numbers were defensible and the negotiation was about pricing alone. The first two weeks of fieldwork reset that assumption: the count itself was the problem.
SAP's renewal model carried 18,400 Named Users across the consolidated LAW. Of those, 11,600 were classified as Professional, 4,200 as Limited Professional, and 2,600 as Employee Self-Service. The Recruiting subscriber line was quoted at 21,800 active hiring managers, against a verified active-recruiter population the client's HR analytics team estimated under 1,400.
The classification was role-based, with every user assigned to the highest band justified by any granted role-collection in any system. The dormant account count had not been reconciled in over three years; SAP's count included accounts deactivated in SU01 but still flagged as named users in LAW because of stale CUA snapshots.
The opening commercial framing positioned the $9.4M as a market-aligned renewal price. The framing concealed the structural rebuild SAP had quietly performed on the subscriber-count basis. Our one-page line-item reconciliation exposed the shift.
We worked four defence levers in parallel against the opening count. Each closed a measurable portion of the gap and none required commercial concession from SAP.
We re-ran USMM with corrected employee-category mappings across all forty-three system IDs, consolidated the LAW snapshot with deduplication on email and employee-ID, and reclassified 7,300 users to lower bands on the basis of twelve-month transaction evidence. The corrected count landed at 11,100 Named Users.
We identified 5,800 dormant accounts that were inactive over the prior twelve months and either deactivated in SU01 but still in the LAW count, or active but with zero transactional activity beyond logon. The accounts were retired with documented sign-off from the relevant system owners.
We rebuilt the SuccessFactors Recruiting subscriber count to the contractually defined population of active recruiters with open or recently closed requisitions. The verified count was 1,300, against the quoted 21,800. The redefinition removed $1.8M of the renewal increase.
Across the forty-three system landscape, several users carried Professional licences in three or more systems while their actual high-band activity was in only one. We rebalanced the pool to assign one Professional licence per user across the estate with lower bands elsewhere, retiring 1,400 duplicate Professional entitlements.
The renewal closed at $3.3M annual run-rate against the opening $9.4M, a sixty-five per cent reduction. The three-year contract value was reduced by approximately $18.3M against the opening projection.
Contractually, we secured a Named User definition that ties classification to documented transactional activity rather than role assignment, a LAW consolidation methodology agreed in writing as the measurement basis for the contract term, and a Recruiting subscriber definition that requires active-recruiter evidence at every annual reconciliation.
The internal SAM function adopted a continuous rebalancing cadence with quarterly LAW snapshots and a dormant-account retirement programme on a monthly cycle. The contracted entitlement now includes one thousand users of headroom against documented growth projections, removing the need for an interim true-up over the contract term.
We rebuilt the count, not the price. The price followed the count down to a sustainable number, and the negotiation took half the time we had budgeted.
Continuous Named User rebalancing, dormant-account retirement, and cross-system entitlement consolidation across multi-system SAP estates.
Read the brief →Renewal restructuring, settlement modelling, and clause-by-clause contract work for organisations facing a SAP renewal cycle.
Read the brief →Professional, Limited Professional, Employee Self-Service. The band definitions and reclassification thresholds.
Forty-page reference on classification methodology, evidence files, and continuous rebalancing across the SAP estate.
How a Tier-1 insurer reset Named User assignments across 9,200 users and saved $5.6M on a renewal.
It is the opening position of a negotiation. Speak with a specialist before responding. The first conversation is at no cost and under privilege.
Contact Us →Every Wednesday. Field reports from active matters, decoded SAP communications, and what to look for in the next audit cycle. Work email only.