A global automotive supplier rebuilt the document flow across thirty-one non-SAP systems, reclassified eleven RFC integrations, and reduced an eight-figure exposure by eighty-two per cent.
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 tier-one automotive components manufacturer with twenty-two plants across the United States, Mexico, Germany, and Hungary. The estate had grown through a decade of acquisitions, leaving SAP ECC 6.0 as the financial backbone with thirty-one downstream and upstream integrations — dealer portals, EDI gateways, a Salesforce field-service tenant, two legacy MES platforms inherited through M&A, and a procurement marketplace operated by the parent group.
The engagement was triggered when SAP Global License Audit and Compliance issued a written notice citing indirect-use exposure across the integration estate. The opening claim of fourteen point two million dollars was based on a SAP-side analysis of RFC and IDoc traffic, plus a named-user uplift covering external dealers, suppliers, and field-service technicians.
Three things were at stake. A material balance-sheet contingency disclosed at quarter close. A renewal of the master ECC contract scheduled fourteen months out, where any unsettled indirect-use position would anchor the negotiation. And a strategic decision on RISE conversion that SAP had been pushing for two consecutive cycles. The Chief Procurement Officer engaged outside counsel before the second meeting with SAP’s regional account team.
SAP’s written position broke the fourteen point two million into three categories. Approximately seven point four million was attributed to indirect access through the Salesforce field-service integration, calculated against ten thousand four hundred named human users with read-and-write access patterns. Four point one million was attributed to the EDI gateway and supplier portal traffic, measured against an estimated four million annual sales documents created via integration. The remaining two point seven million covered the dealer portal and the two inherited MES platforms, calculated against named-user counts that included every dealership login ever recorded in the access log over a four-year window.
The methodology relied on three measurement choices that the client’s SAM team had not previously interrogated. SAP counted every authenticated session in the dealer portal as a chargeable named user, with no de-duplication for accounts that had been provisioned and never activated. The Salesforce indirect-use figure assumed that every read operation was a chargeable use, ignoring whether the data being read had been originated by a human at all. And the EDI document count was a gross figure, not a net figure — system-to-system acknowledgements, duplicate routing records, and internal retries were all included.
Once the contract definitions were read against the measurement, three lines of defence emerged. We took the engagement under privilege and set a fourteen-week clock.
The work proceeded along four named tactics, run in parallel by separate workstreams.
We rebuilt the document inventory from the source system rather than from the SAP-side log. The original four-million-document count was reduced to a net seven hundred and forty thousand chargeable sales-equivalent documents after removing internal acknowledgements, duplicate retry records, and intra-system status updates. The EDI gateway had been generating two outbound traces for every inbound message, both of which had been counted as separate creation events.
Eleven of the thirty-one integrations were reclassified after a clause-by-clause read of the original contract. Three RFC connections served system-administration purposes that the contract definition explicitly excluded from chargeable use. Four integrations operated on master data that had originated outside SAP, where the document-creation event was not in scope. Four others were genuine indirect-use connections, but the document flow was already covered under the named-user licences held by the internal users initiating the workflow.
The ten thousand four hundred named-user figure on the dealer portal was reduced to two thousand one hundred and forty after applying three filters: removing accounts that had logged in fewer than three times in the audit window, removing accounts that had not been re-provisioned after the last dealer-network reorganisation, and applying the contract definition of an “active named user” instead of the operational definition the SAM team had been using internally.
The genuine indirect-use exposure that remained — principally the Salesforce field-service traffic and four legitimate EDI flows — was modelled under the Digital Access document conversion option. At negotiated tier-three pricing with an annual measurement cap, the converted position came to one point nine million dollars, against a comparable named-user position of approximately five point eight million.
Settlement closed at two million six hundred thousand dollars, split between a cash component of nine hundred thousand and conversion credits applied against the existing licence pool of one million seven hundred thousand. The reduction was approximately eighty-two per cent below the opening position. No new named-user blocks were purchased. The Salesforce position was converted to Digital Access under a tier-three rate with a measurement cap valid for the remaining contract term.
Four contract provisions were rewritten as part of the settlement. The indirect-use clause was redefined to align with the current Digital Access document definitions, removing ambiguity around acknowledgement traffic. The audit-rights clause was narrowed to a two-year cycle with sixty days’ written notice and a defined data-exchange scope limited to RFC/IDoc summary statistics. A re-measurement protection clause was added, capping any future Digital Access true-up at twelve per cent over the current baseline. A settlement-as-release clause confirmed that no further claim could be raised on the audited period.
The matter closed in fourteen weeks from the audit notification, allowing the contingent liability to be removed from the next quarter’s financial statement before close.
The number SAP opened with had no relation to the contract we’d signed. The defence was simply reading the words on the page and counting the right things.
Document flow and exposure mapping. We rebuild the integration topology from the source systems, classify each RFC connection against the original contract definitions, and model the conversion options before SAP anchors a number.
Read the brief →End-to-end audit response. The matter is put on a written procedural footing within five business days, the scope of data exchange is defined, and the negotiation is run to a closed settlement with rewritten contract clauses.
Read the brief →The complete topic page on indirect access, document definitions, RFC traffic, and the Digital Access conversion calculus.
The thirty-two-page analyst paper on indirect-use measurement, the eleven clause variations SAP has used since 2017, and how to defend each one.
The cluster index for thirty long-form articles on indirect access, RFC reclassification, and named-user vs. document-based settlement.
A global retailer rebuilt its integration topology and reduced an $11M Salesforce indirect-use claim to $1.9M.
A second indirect-access matter from the same calendar year, with a different document-flow shape and an analogous result.
The reference article on classifying RFC integrations, the seven categories SAP measurement applies, and the five it commonly mis-applies.
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