A Fortune 500 manufacturer reclassified RFC traffic, demonstrated that two integrations produced no chargeable events, and converted the remaining exposure at Digital Access tier pricing.
The figures below are real and verifiable through a confidentiality-protected reference call arranged on request. The client's identity is withheld at their election.
The manufacturer is a Fortune 500 industrial group with approximately 22,000 employees and five production sites across the United States, Mexico, and Brazil. SAP ECC 6.0 has been the operational backbone since the early 2010s, with nine engines layered on top covering plant maintenance, quality management, materials management, and a custom indirect-procurement portal.
The trigger was a formal letter from SAP's Global License Audit and Compliance group identifying five integrations as potential sources of indirect access exposure. The integrations covered Salesforce CRM, a Workday HCM feed, a custom dealer portal, an EDI broker for inbound supplier transactions, and a small reporting layer feeding a Tableau analytics environment.
The procurement leadership engaged outside counsel before any data was shared with SAP and before any account-team meetings were scheduled.
SAP's opening claim totalled $14.2M, broken into three lines. The first line was an RFC-based estimate of approximately 240 million indirect read and write events across the five integrations, priced at SAP's list document-based Digital Access rate. The second line was a retrospective named-user uplift for indirect human users accessing SAP data through the Salesforce CRM environment. The third line was a back-trail of historic exposure stretching to the original ECC go-live date, on the theory that the contract had been in effect throughout.
SAP's account team paired the claim with an informal offer: convert to RISE within the quarter and the entire indirect access matter could be settled inside the conversion contract, with credits applied against the new commitment.
The combined effect of the three lines and the conversion offer was to anchor the negotiation at a number significantly higher than any defensible measurement would support.
The defence opened with a five-day procedural reset. A scope letter went to SAP defining the data exchange protocol, restricting informal calls, and confirming that the engagement was being handled under privilege. The matter was placed on a written footing within the first week.
The integration topology was then rebuilt from the client's own logs. The custom dealer portal was demonstrated to be a one-way read-only feed that produced no chargeable events under the contract definitions in force at the original ECC contract date. The EDI broker was shown to fall under the long-standing carve-out for partner-to-system integrations. Both lines were challenged on first principles and removed from the claim.
The remaining three integrations (Salesforce, Workday, Tableau) carried genuine document flow. The defence rebuilt the document count using the firm's own integration logs, removed cancellation events and internal system-to-system traffic, and produced a reconciled count approximately 38 per cent of SAP's opening figure.
Settlement closed at $3.6M against an opening claim of $14.2M. The reduction was approximately 75 per cent. No retrospective historic charge was paid. Two of the five integrations were retired from the claim entirely. The remaining three were converted to Digital Access at a negotiated volume-tier price with a measurement-cap clause and a re-measurement protection clause valid for the remaining contract term.
Three contract clauses were added or rewritten as part of the settlement. A Digital Access definitions clause was added defining the term “document” with the cancellation and internal-traffic carve-outs documented. The audit-rights clause was narrowed to a two-year cycle. A settlement-as-release clause confirmed that no further claim could be raised on the audited period or earlier years.
Total elapsed time from the initial letter to signed settlement was sixteen weeks. The matter closed inside a single fiscal half.
The reductions secured in this matter reflect a combination of contractual leverage, evidentiary discipline, and timing. Buyers running comparable estates can adapt the same playbook with a small number of adjustments. The takeaways below are the ones that travel best.
Two of the five integrations should never have been in the claim. The rest were measured wrong. By week eight we had rebuilt the number with evidence SAP could not dispute.
We rebuild the integration topology from your logs, identify which integrations produce chargeable events under your contract, and negotiate the settlement on evidence.
Read the brief →When Digital Access conversion is the right answer, we negotiate the document-tier pricing, the carve-outs in the document definition, and the measurement-cap protection clauses.
Read the brief →How a global retailer rebuilt its integration topology and reduced an $11M Salesforce indirect-use claim to $1.9M.
A multinational logistics carrier rebuilt the Digital Access count and removed sixty-four per cent of the claimed document volume.
The buyer's reference for indirect-use exposure mapping, document counting, and the five contract carve-outs every buyer should negotiate.
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