A mid-market manufacturer was sold a GROW FUE conversion at 3,540 units. We rebuilt the role-to-FUE mapping on activity evidence and converted at 2,200. The conversion came in $1.4M below the initial quote.
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The manufacturer had been working with SAP on a GROW conversion proposal for six months. The SAP-led conversion math had landed at 3,540 FUE, derived from a role-to-FUE mapping spreadsheet that had been prepared by the SAP account team and accepted by the procurement function without independent review.
Internal finance had signed off on the FUE count and was preparing to commit. The CFO had a board commitment for the conversion to land in the next fiscal year. The conversion proposal carried a list price of approximately $3.6M annually, before any negotiation discount.
We were engaged through a referral from the manufacturer’s external legal counsel, who had reviewed the GROW contract template and flagged the FUE conversion math as worth a second opinion. The brief was specifically to rebuild the FUE count, not to renegotiate the price.
SAP’s GROW conversion proposal landed at 3,540 FUE. The role-to-FUE mapping had been built from a default mapping table SAP applies to ECC role collections, without reference to the manufacturer’s actual activity profile or role usage data.
Four tactics applied to the FUE conversion. Each tactic was an evidence-based rebuild of one component of the SAP mapping, supported by activity data from the existing ECC estate.
We pulled twelve months of transaction history from the ECC estate, mapped each user to their actual activity profile, and reclassified them against the GROW FUE definitions rather than the role-collection mapping. The reclassification reduced the Core FUE count from 2,950 to 1,820, primarily by moving low-activity users from Core to Self-Service.
We re-examined the 480 users tagged for Advanced FUE. Of those, 340 had no transactional activity that required the Advanced tier under SAP’s published FUE definitions. The remaining 140 were confirmed at Advanced. The Advanced FUE count moved from 480 to 140.
The Self-Service FUE count was expanded from 110 to 240 to capture the low-activity users moved out of Core. The expansion was accompanied by a documented activity profile per user, supporting the assignment against the FUE definition.
We identified 580 named users in the ECC estate with no transactional activity over the twelve-month measurement window. The 580 were retired ahead of the conversion rather than carried across at any FUE tier. The retirement closed the gap between the SAP-led mapping and the final count.
The final GROW conversion landed at 2,200 FUE: 1,820 Core, 140 Advanced, and 240 Self-Service. The conversion came in 38% below the SAP-led mapping of 3,540 FUE.
The annual subscription value moved from $3.6M to $2.2M at list, a $1.4M annual reduction before any discount negotiation. The negotiated final price was further reduced through standard GROW discount-stacking tactics during the conversion close.
The conversion contract included an annual remeasurement clause with a documented activity-based methodology, replacing the role-collection mapping as the basis for future FUE adjustments. The clause protects the manufacturer from inflation drift on the FUE count over the contract term.
The activity-based FUE remap was performed against twelve months of ECC transaction history, with each user mapped to their actual activity profile across the FI, MM, SD, PP, and HR modules. The GROW FUE definitions were applied at the activity level, not at the role-collection level, in line with SAP’s published FUE classification guidance. The dormant-user identification used a combined criterion of last-login date plus transaction-history activity, with both criteria required to be inactive for retirement. The remeasurement clause drafted into the contract follows the same activity-based methodology as the conversion analysis, ensuring methodological continuity over the contract term.
We were ready to sign at 3,540. The rebuild work took nine weeks. The conversion saved $1.4M every year for the next five years. That is the most expensive nine weeks we ever delayed.
Conversion math, FUE remapping, and the migration-stage compliance work that protects the renewal economics.
Read the brief →Reclassify users. Retire shelfware. Right-size engine metrics. The continuous reduction programme that runs between the audit cycles, year after year.
Read the brief →FUE conversion math, public-cloud restrictions, and the contract clauses that protect the renewal.
The public-cloud GROW landing pad for mid-market customers. The package, the pricing, and the audit rights.
How a mid-market customer converted from ECC to GROW and saved $2.3M annually on the conversion math.
Further reading: related white paper · cluster pillar · topic page
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